Tim O'Reilly On Big Data, CS Education, and the Future of Print

M-Saunders writes: How do we take advantage of big data without putting our privacy at risk? Should everyone be able to code? And how much life is still in the market for printed books and publications? Linux Voice put these questions to Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly media, and the man who helped to popularize the terms Open Source and Web 2.0. ("Should everybody be a professional coder? No way. Should everybody be able to do more than just use a GUI? Absolutely. Should people be able to automate operations of a computer? Absolutely.") Despite the amount of "free" (or advert-supported) content out there, O'Reilly still believes there's plenty of money to be made: "I think that the willingness of people to pay for things that delight them will not go away."

Comments

What is this "Educaiton" you speak of?

[mgoheen]

How fitting...

Re:What is this "Educaiton" you speak of?

[mgoheen]

Oh sure, cover the evidence...

Price matters.

[geekmux]

"I think that the willingness of people to pay for things that delight them will not go away."

That's an interesting theory.

Tell everyone that ad-supported hardware will be going away, and that new fancy cell phone will cost $900 on top of the contract.

App stores will no longer subsidize with advertising, so you will pay for every app that delights you.

Yes, let's just see how much willingness is still out there.

Re:Price matters.

[jellomizer]

The thing is. Most people really don't get so crazy about adds, just as long as they don't get too abusive.

I am sure most of you don't remember the internet before ads.
In short there wasn't much to it.
We had a few companies posing their sales fliers, we had some academic papers. Software companies may have had a public FTP site. The rest was an attempt to make a Telnet version of the BBS (The old dial up ones, that were more then a message board) The bulk of the interesting stuff was on the IRC, internet apps were via Telnet. To get access to a lot of these places even the public ones, you needed to give out far more personal information then you would ever do today.

When companies could urge companies to pay them to post their ads, that is when the big growth of the public internet came out. Most internet sites without the revenue from ads, will not make it.
Lets use Slashdot:
Do you think enough people are willing to pay slashdot directly to keep them operational?
Do you think slashdot would be able to keep its load, enough to bring down other sites without significant revenue?
If you had to pay for it. Would you use it or switch to an other site such as OSnews?

Re:Price matters.

[Alrescha]

"Tell everyone that ad-supported hardware will be going away, and that new fancy cell phone will cost $900 on top of the contract."

The problem with your statement is that it implies that there is someone other than the consumer who pays for advertising.

If advertising went away tomorrow, the aggregate cost of all goods sold would go down as a result (and we would stop paying for crap that *nobody* wants).

A.

Re:Price matters.

[mjm1231]

"I think that the willingness of people to pay for things that delight them will not go away."

That's an interesting theory.

Tell everyone that ad-supported hardware will be going away, and that new fancy cell phone will cost $900 on top of the contract.

T-Mobile, for one, already does this. They offer plans with no contracts and no subsidized phones. You can purchase any phone they sell through their stores and have the price divided up into monthly payments. If you don't like any of those phones, you can purchase any compatible phone with a sim card slot, from any seller you want. I've used prepaid monthly plan phones from Wal-mart, and at one time I was using a jailbroken iPhone 4 made for another carrier. I've got 5 phones on this plan, and I think the last contract subsidized phone I purchased was probably 4 or 5 years ago.

Re:Price matters.

[Alrescha]

"I am sure most of you don't remember the internet before ads."

The Internet before ads was a technology in its infancy. Ads did not make the Internet better, time did.

(and, as someone who *does* remember the Internet before ads, it was quite wonderful)

A.

Re:Price matters.

[Hognoxious]

Most people really don't get so crazy about adds

Everything has its pluses and minuses. But excessive multiplication and the resulting division is the real threat.

Wrong value proposition

[BarbaraHudson]

But there’s one quote in particular that resonates with us here at Linux Voice. It was partly responsible for the inception of the magazine, and it’s one we think encapsulates the spirit of open source: “Create more value than you capture.”

This "philosophy" has ZERO to do with open source. When people vote with their wallets, they're saying that what they pay for is worth at least as much as what they're paying. This applies to everything in the marketplace.

People will say "but open source creates more value because it's shared." Not to the millions who pay for closed-source programs and operating systems, obviously, and they're still in the majority.

And then there's the "it's open, so you can see, audit, and modify the code." Most users don't want to be bothered with having to look at the code when something breaks, do code audits, or modify the code - they just want someone to complain to.when it goes wrong.

It's the same value proposition as music - anyone is free to make music, but most people prefer the stuff coming from real musicians, professionally produced. They don't want to hear their neighbors sing, even if it's free and they can modify it and sing themselves. And how "free" is it when everyone has to be dragged into using systemd?

For some things, open source software does a better job for the job at hand. THAT is the only value proposition 99% of the people making the decisions care about; closed systems sell a lot because to users, they have more value than free/open ones. Android surged ahead because of the value proposition to their customers - the phone manufacturers - no license fees. But if it hadn't been able to do the job, it would have been DOA because the number one criterion for people is still "does it work", not "is it free or open".

The future of print

[mariox19]

Let me guess, Mr. O'Reilly: $70 programming books as the norm.

Re:Educaiton

[cayenne8]

I myself STILL like a lot of my information, especially reference stuff in dead tree format.

I read a lot on the web, but I prefer, even if I have to print it out...to have dead tree copies where I can highlight, make notes, doodle...etc.

I found that way back in my school days, that in my notebooks taking notes or even marking things in books....with doodles, or this or that, when I had to take a test, I could often close my eyes, and picture in my head turning to the pages with the information, I could "see" my pictures and writings, and that helped me to find and recall information.

I can't well do that on a computer screen. Well, at least the last time I used a marker, it quickly got messy and when I changed pages, well, the marks didn't make sense on the screen anymore.

:)

Sure, it is easier to keep information more up to date on we webpage for documentation, but its not guarantee, and then with some sites, links into links into links into links....you drill down so much that you can't hardly find your way back to where you want to be when you started, and it wastes time which with a book, I could check the index, get other info and come back to the page I dog eared pretty quickly.

I like it for pleasure reading too. I can do some ebooks and have and it is convenient. I like a dead tree book, but it isn't as big a deal to me as it is for things I need to recall and reference on a regular basis.

I guess that explains the piles on my desks.