You've got to be kidding that I'm channelling Stallman. He's finally waking up to an issue that I put in front of him all the way back in 1999. At the time, he said "It didn't matter." See for yourself, in the transcript of our interchange at the 1999 Wizards of OS conference in Berlin. They are a fair way through the PDF of the transcript, so read on down: http://tim.oreilly.com/archives/mikro_discussion.pdf
At the time I was talking about "infoware" rather than "Web 2.0" but the concepts I was working with were in the same direction.
But in case you don't want to go through all that, here's the relevant bit:
Richard Stallman:
I came up to the mike again because I wanted to address the topic that Tim O'Reilly raised. Some of you might know about our major disagreements on other issues, but that's not what he spoke about. And I think that this distinction between hardware and software and infoware is an interesting one and that you addressed it very well from the open source point of view. That being a matter of looking for a development methodology of making things that work and judging success to a large extent in the same concept of market share or number of users that is used as a criterion by the proprietary software developers. Now, looking at that same concept, that same situation from the Free Software point of view, I bring to this a different idea of goals and a different idea of a criterion. The goal in the Free Software movement is to extend our freedom. 'Ours' meaning that of whoever wants freedom to work together so that freedom spreads over a wider range of activities. And so our criterion isn't really about market share, ever and it's only secondarily about 'Do we have good technology, does the program work reliably?' Obviously if it works badly enough it won't be useful, but otherwise we can fix it, so that's just a side issue. The important thing is: How many activities can we do without giving up our freedom? What is the range of things that we can do on a computer which has just free software on it, where we don't have to compromise our freedom to do any of those things?
Now when you apply this criterion to things like web servers that answer certain kinds of questions for you, that communicate with you, you find an interesting thing: a proprietary program on a web server that somebody else is running limits his freedom perhaps, but it doesn't limit your freedom or my freedom. We don't have that program on our computers at all, and in fact the issue of free software versus proprietary arises for software that we're going to have on our computers and run on our computers. We're gonna have copies and the question is, what are we allowed to do with those copies? Are we just allowed to run them or are we allowed to do the other useful things that you can do with a program? If the program is running on somebody else's computer, the issue doesn't arise. Am I allowed to copy the program that Amazon has on it's computer? Well, I can't, I don't have that program at all, so it doesn't put me in a morally compromised position, the way I would be if I were supposed to have a program on my computer and the law says I can't give you a copy when you come visit me. That really puts me on the spot morally. If a proprietary program is on Amazon's computer, that's Amazon's conscience. Now I would like them to have freedom too. I hope they will want freedom, and they will work with me so that we all get freedom, but it's not directly an attack on you and me if Amazon has a proprietary program on their computer. It's not crucially important to you and me whether Amazon uses a free operating system like GNU plus Linux, or a free web server like Apache. I mean I hope they will, I hope free software will be popular, but if they give up their freedom, that's just a shame it's not a danger to us who want free
Not sure what you mean by the idea that we "play favorites" at O'Reilly. I'd love to hear details so I can respond.
I can respond to the idea that we pay the lowest royalty rate, and your ideas about ebooks.
It's true that some publishers have higher nominal royalty rates than we do, but most of them take big "reserves against returns" that mean that you actually get a lot less than you think you do. Or they have a higher rate for some sales, but a lower rate for others, such that your blended rate for all sales is much lower than you expect. We offer one rate for all sales. That's a feature, not a bug.
I'll also point out that a royalty is a percentage. A higher percentage of smaller sales is still less money last time I looked. And at O'Reilly, we have the highest revenue per title of any publisher except Microsoft Press (whose volumes are lower but prices are much higher.)
Regarding ebooks, it's an misconception that the costs are much lower for ebooks. The costs of printing, returns, and warehousing are only about 20% of our net dollars we get from books (or about 10% of the list price). (If you've done the math on the previous sentence, you see that the retailer gets at least half of the list price.) So the costs aren't all that much lower for ebooks. And the consumer is demanding the savings. Ebooks are generally sold at a significant discount off the print book price, so the net to the publisher (and author) is actually lower than for print books.
Meanwhile, having an aggressive program for ebooks means we've had to invest millions of dollars over many years to build the market. If you think that ebooks means just putting a pdf on your website, you're missing the boat. The differences between publishers in their ability to get ebook revenues are enormous. There are actually as many ebook channels to sell through now than print outlets. For us, Safari Books Online is the biggest, but Stanza on the iPhone is coming on strong, as is the Kindle, Scribd, with many others entering the market. (Safari is actually our second biggest revenue source after Amazon, ahead of Barnes & Noble. It's the only ebook channel right now that generates enough to make it one of our top ten revenue channels, though Stanza and direct ebook sales from oreilly.com are coming on strong.) Building channels like this costs money - big sales force etc. It's not actually the kind of low cost revenue people imagine.
In fact, if your publisher pays a significantly higher royalty for ebooks, it's likely that they are just treating ebooks as "gravy." If they don't take them seriously, neither should you. Ebook sales are now at least 20% of our total revenue and climbing. When they are 50% or more, you'll see all those publishers with outlandish ebook rates scrambling to
Tim O'Reilly here. I was alarmed by this comment, as I don't like to think that my marketing department sends out spam, so I forwarded this message on to the team. Here's the reply I got: "this person has posted this before. We've searched for his email with no luck. I responded to his comment previously on slashdot and asked for him to send me a copy of the email so we could research. He never replied. Instead of letting us fix it, he would rather be a troll."
I suspect, now that I look more carefully, that there's more than to it than trolling. I notice the link, "Find free books," the claim that we tried to send him a physics book, something we haven't yet published, and I suspect that it is the poster who is a spammer.
bcrowell - if this is a legitimate complaint, please send us a copy of the email you received from us, or your own email address, and we'll see if you've ever been on our list, and if so, make sure you aren't any more.
Bo Cowgill, who wrote the paper on Google's prediction market, will be talking about their project at our Money:Tech conference in New York Feb 6-7. See http://conferences.oreillynet.com/money2008 for details.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about parallels between Web 2.0 and Wall Street. Because of course, the stock market is one of the largest prediction markets of all.
But it doesn't end there. There are lots of fascinating things to learn by studying the parallels, including why Web 2.0 will turn away from aggregating public content to providing new ways for anonymized aggregation, why Google and other search engines will increasingly compete with the sites they index, and why web 2.0 companies might find new markets by providing insight -- or even new kinds of financial futures (see for example weatherbill.com) to financial markets.
So this post is perfectly timed. It's a collection of essays by leading software engineers about code they find especially beautiful.
Andy Oram, the editor, thought it would be poor form to make a post himself, but heck, I thought: this is very relevant. The table of contents for the book can be found at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046/toc.h tml
It includes essays by Brian Kernighan, Jon Bentley, Tim Bray, Yukohiro Matsumoto, Simon Peyton-Jones, and many others. The code is intended not only to be beautiful but also instructive and in many cases re-usable.
We're hoping to build an ongoing site around the book so additional examples would be very welcome.
that he thought Bill Atkinson's MacPaint was the most beautiful program ever written. Hearing this, Andy Hertzfeld made it a priority to recover the source code from an old Macintosh diskette. He contacted me because he was a bit worried about Apple's reaction if he just released it on the net (since it was Apple property), and I advised him to get the Computer History Museum involved if he didn't want to take the risk. I believe that he donated the code, but I'm not sure what the Museum did to have it made available.
This is Tim O'Reilly. You are misinformed. We never filed a lawsuit against Manning. We wrote them a letter asking them not to do books that were obviously trading on the association that we had built between animal book covers and technical topics. They understood the issue and changed their branding. The result: Manning came up with some original brands, that were not confusing, and have helped them to become more successful, with their own identity. Knockoffs are rarely as successful as the original.
Incidentally, Manning is now distributed by O'Reilly. If we had done them wrong, do you think this would be the case?
I'm not surprised that theodp would submit this story, but I'm surprised that slashdot would run it. O'Reilly files trademarks is news? Especially trademarks that we filed over ten years ago?
A little bit of background on the specific trademark applications cited, either in the story or in the comments:
The trademark for Website -- which was, incidentally, the first Windows-based web server, back in 1995 -- was for a particular graphic mark -- the name website in red letters in a yellow oval in a kind of superman logo. It was not for generic use of the term.
I don't remember the trademark application for netizens (it was back in 1994), but I believe it was a joint project with the folks who originated the term to create an online directory of net citizens -- and was specific to that use.
Similarly, people commenting in the thread brought up the O'Reilly trademarks on animal book covers. Once again, people don't understand the concept of a trademark. It's not for any animal on the cover of a book, it's for a specific animal in a specific context -- say, the camel for Perl.
And as to the people who say, "O'Reilly shouldn't have exclusive rights to that association between perl and the camel, and the right to say who can use it", I say, "why not?" Is there any conceivable reason for the camel to be associated with Perl besides the fact that it first appeared on our book cover?
The fact that the images are public domain (and not all are) is completely irrelevant. The words used in most trademarks are also in the public domain. It's their particular context and field of use that gives them protection. Nike means victory in Greek. But in athletic shoes, it means one particular brand of shoes, because someone made that association, which didn't exist before, through their commercial activity.
For what it's worth, here are some common words that are in fact trademarked for a particular field of use:
Apple - for personal computers Oracle - for databases Windows - for operating systems Red Hat - for versions of Linux salesforce.com - for CRM systems for Dummies - books for people who need to understand the basics of a new field (e.g. trademarks:-)
Oh, and by the way, slashdot (/., btw, which is a common "word" in Unix/Linux shell speak) and sourceforge are both trademarks of VA. So if you want to boycott anyone who has trademarks, you should start by boycotting this thread:-) Oh, and you should stop using Linux and Apache and Firefox, because Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, and Apache is a trademark of the Apache Software Foundation, and Firefox is a trademark of the Mozilla Foundation.
I don't think that O'Reilly's use of trademarks is any different than the use by folks like these.
While we began our animal covers using Dover clip art, we didn't end there. We now have a large collection of 19th century books containing original woodcuts (the same source that Dover used to build their collections). In addition, a number of the illustrations are contemporary. We have found people (notably Lorrie Lejeune) who were able to make pen and ink images that matched the woodcut style. See if you can identify the contemporary images without looking at the Colophon...
The travel books are not published by O'Reilly itself, but by another company I started called Travelers Tales. See http://www.travelerstales.com./
I like to think they are pretty good - they've won lots of awards and get the same kind of glowing praise from their readers as our technical books.
They aren't guidebooks per se, but rather collections of stories about places, to give you an idea of what the place is like before you go, or if you're just an armchair traveler.
I was glad to see that the moderator at least labeled the "dept" correctly -- but I wish that slashdot wasn't reduced to posting flamebait in order to drive traffic.
Theodp did indeed submit what he thought was prior art to the bountyquest 1-click competition -- he sent in a huge binder of IBM mainframe documentation without any comment about what part of it he considered prior art. When pressed for details, he gave some section numbers, but for the life of me I couldn't see its relevance, and neither could any of the bountyquest patent attorneys. It basically described a system in which you issued commands, and the computer responded! I think we all know a few of those. I gave him far more time and consideration than the actual merit of his submission required -- it seemed to me to be one of the most useless and irrelevant of all the submissions, yet he keeps claiming it as if it were the answer. Spending time answering his assertions seems only to have whetted his appetite for attention.
Theodp's accusations of malfeasance are particularly irritating because I did in fact pay out $10,000 of my own money for the three pieces of prior art that seemed most relevant. None of them were a slam dunk, though. (However, after the contest ended and BountyQuest went on the rocks, someone did send me a killer piece of prior art, which I still have in my possession in the event that Amazon ever sues anyone else over 1-click. I never used it because in the interim, Amazon settled with Barnes & Noble, and the case was put to bed. Meanwhile, I had become convinced that Amazon had seen the light (and the pressure -- suing B&N was a PR disaster for them) and would not again choose to use patents offensively.
As to acquiring patents (however ridiculous), the system is so broken that all companies are doing it these days, so that they'll have some defense if someone else sues them. Amazon is no worse in this regard than anyone else, and I believe that because of their bad experience, they are likely a lot better. They understand in a way they never did before that they are part of a technology ecosystem, and owe a lot to the open source and open standards developer community who created their opportunity. The Amazon web services interface is a direct outcome of what they learned through their mistakes over the offensive use of the 1-click patent, and the conversations about "giving back" that ensued.
The fact that BountyQuest failed was a big disappointment both to me and to Jeff -- it seemed like a good idea. But like many other startups in the dotcom era, it didn't make it over the hump.
I've always thought that the discussion of the success or failure of ebooks turns on a false premise -- namely that an ebook is some fairly exact electronic simulacrum of a printed book. In fact, any time you move to a new medium, the possibilities expand and morph. A movie is not a camera pointed at a stage play. Once you have that perspective, you might categorize EverQuest as an electronic fantasy novel? It's far more an "ebook" to my mind than a copy of Lord of the Rings reproduced in PDF on screen. Take advantage of the medium.
Moving to my own field of reference works, I've always argued that successful ebooks will be larger or smaller than printed books, with the "ebook" an interface to a back end database that lets you get bits or buckets as you need them. For example, O'Reilly's online publishing efforts have focused on creating short articles (viz. www.oreillynet.com and affiliated sites), and a large database of technical content (safari.oreilly.com). Safari now contains more than 3000 titles from O'Reilly, Pearson (AW, Peachpit, et al), and Microsoft Press. Advantages of the database approach include searching across the complete corpus, annotation, and the like. But that's just the beginning. The kinds of services that you can start to build when you have that database in place start to get really interesting. We're planning on launching some of those services next year.
I've been following it ever since he first did Netscan back at UCLA. In fact, I used Netscan to do the statistics for the Esther Dyson Release 1.0 issue on open source in 1998, projecting the relative size of open source communities by comparing their usenet footprint (as well as other stats, like size of conferences and mailing lists.)
We had Marc do a presentation on what he's doing at the last O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, and it was very well received. Marc's at Microsoft Research, and he's a guy slashdotters would all relate to if you actually knew him.
I'm puzzled. Theodp has sent me this stuff before, always claiming that it is prior art for one-click, but at least based on the materials submitted, I don't see it. Maybe you guys who know more about the system in question see this as prior art. But can you please explain? There's nothing in the documentation that gives any insight into what results are produced by the various actions described here. From the manual, it might just run a batch job, or move you to another screen. For this to be considered as prior art, it would seem to me that it would require some evidence that the actions in question were to purchase something. And I don't see that here. Where are you guys seeing that?
It has nothing to do with confidence in open source. My point is that hacking will eventually stop being fun in many areas that are now the heartland of the open source movement. All the interesting problems will have been solved *in that area* and so the hackers will move on to new areas.
Meanwhile, you have only to look at the way that folks like Red Hat are trying to gain increasing control over their users to see the commercial dynamics that I'm talking about. RH as a commercial business isn't that different from a proprietary software company -- you should have seen Robert Lefkowitz (r0ml)'s talk at OScon, where he compared Red Hat's P&L to Borland's -- and you could see that from a financial pov they were nearly identical, except that what Borland called "licenses", Red Hat called "subscriptions." Leading r0ml to a wonderful slide called "Sharia Compliant Mortgages", which showed some of the creative accounting used in Islamic countries to get around the Islamic law prohibition on charging interest.
These things are always more complex than they appear. No simple answers. But that's what makes it fun.
Open source is great, but the choice between open and proprietary is not going to end up with an either-or solution.
You say: "The thing that struck me about the article is that he just now figured out what's going on."
Actually, I started talking about all this in 1997. See http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource/, and scroll to the bottom. (It's in reverse chronological order.) My very first talk on open source software was on this same topic.
Obviously, all the value in software isn't going to go away, any more than all the value went out of hardware with the introduction of the commodity PC. But I try to remind people of Ray Kurzweil's comment: "I'm an inventor, and I started studying long term trends, because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started."
I believe that we're entering a period with just as much positive disruption to the computer industry as the one that started with the introduction of the IBM PC. I'm not "redefining" software to fit my prejudices, just pointing out that as certain types of software are being commoditized, value is pushed "up the stack" to services, and that we need to broaden our idea of what those services might be, and the role that open source plays in them.
This isn't just about sites like Amazon and EBay, but about those sites as harbingers of a future in which everything is connected, and software migrates away from the individual client computer.
This wasn't really a "prediction" -- I was just trying to think of something outrageous that would get across the idea that some of these vertical market web sites might eventually grow so important as to overshadow current market leaders, just as little Microsoft grew to dominate the market in a way that IBM never imagined in 1982.
I didn't say that Amazon web services, BARWN, Xbox hardware hacking, or MMORPGs were "the next killer app." What I said was that all these things were on my radar, and why. My point was not to pick the most important things out there, but to pick four things that people might not view in the same context, and to identify the common element that put them on my radar: They represent the hacker impulse, people pushing the boundaries of a system and coming up with innovations that the original creators didn't imagine. I outlined some of the key elements that put technologies on my radar: hackability, being in line with some major trend (such as the increase in ubiquitous networking), disruptive potential, grassroots enthusiasm rather than top-down corporate promotion but still the presence of professional practitioners and a possible business ecology.
There are many other technologies that are also on my radar. I chose these four to highlight precisely because they seem so disjoint, yet to me show all of the characteristics that I outlined above, the characteristics that make a technology worth following by O'Reilly.
Actually, the brief report didn't quite capture the thrust of my remarks (which will be up in some form on oreillynet.com within a day or two).
My point was this: if you look at the "alpha geeks", you often can see the shape of the future long before it's obvious in the commercial market. This was true with the PC (which was derided as a toy by the establishment), with the web (ditto), and so on with many new technologies.
Hackers push the envelope to make technologies do what they want before vendors and entrepreneurs package them for other people. My point is that a lot of the things that the hackers and other alpha geeks have been incorporating into their lifestyle for some time - wireless, chat, web services (even if only created by web spidering and screen scraping), peer-to-peer (rendezvous), etc. - are all starting to show up in a nice package.
So to me, this is a good predictor that Apple is really on the right track.
The second part of the talk was somewhat unrelated. It was advice for the future based on what has been successful for Unix, the internet, and open source.
As it turns out, autonomous computing is one of the trends we're following closely at O'Reilly. It's one of the major themes at our emerging technology conference (Building the Internet Operating System) in Santa Clara May 13-16. Robert Morris of IBM is giving a keynote on the subject, and we've got a whole subtrack on biological models for computation. "Emergence" is also the theme of Steven Johnson's keynote.
Overall, if you look at some of what's been happening in the peer-to-peer space (with decentralization@yahoogroups.com being a great place to do that), you'll see how all these themes are coming together with the emergence of new internet-scale operating system models.
Overall, I didn't disagree with the point of the Salon story that software patents are big trouble, and that BountyQuest has had much less of an impact that we hoped. But I found the story shallow in its understanding of the patent system, and drawing rather broad conclusions from very little data.
First, let me also point out that theodp, who submitted this story, has been on a quest to discredit BountyQuest ever since his submission of supposed prior art on the 1-click patent was not chosen for a share of the $10,000 bounty we awarded. He sent in hundreds of pages of material without any explanation of what particular part of it invalidated the patent, and all of those who looked at it couldn't see the remotest relevance. Requests for clarification about just what in this material represented prior art were met with avoidance and hostility. His continued harrassment of both me and BountyQuest has convinced me that he's some kind of a crank. I was disappointed to see Salon picking up his sour grapes as part of his story, and then to see him spinning this further for Slashdot.
Second, while I admire Greg Aharonian for his relentless advocacy of a better patent system, his comments that "BountyQuest is a joke" need to be taken with a grain of salt. They are in fact competitors, using different mechanisms to reach the same goal. Both provide "market mechanisms" to find prior art that potentially can be used to invalidate or confirm patents. Where I do agree with Greg is that requiring applicants to search for prior art is exactly the right thing to do. And it's exactly what I recommended in my own patent advocacy.
Third, there were numerous inaccuracies and flawed conclusions in the Salon story, ranging from the trivial (I collected 10,000 signatures in three days on my anti-1-click petition, not 3500) to the fundamental.
For example, Amazon licensing the InTouch patent doesn't mean that no successful prior art was found. Because these kind of settlements are made behind closed doors, it may be just as likely that Amazon found killer prior art, and that InTouch paid their court costs or did some other kind of swap in order to preserve the fiction that they have a valid patent. I'm not saying that that's what happened, but we have just as much evidence for that statement as was presented for the idea that no prior art was found.
The Salon story suggests that the BountyQuest approach of searching for prior art via Internet bounties is "a joke" because the prior art they found may not have been used in a couple of cases. This is like saying that the open source process is a joke because every patch that's submitted isn't used.
There used to be a mock Tarot deck called Morgan's Tarot, which had a card that said, "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." Dealing with lawyers is like that. I talked with the lawyers in the Barnes & Noble vs. Amazon case, and they really weren't interested in outsiders sticking their nose into their case. So many of these things are handled outside the public view.
The fact that BountyQuest hasn't done as well as expected has as much to do with the funding drought from the high-tech meltdown as from a fundamental failure in its business model. I still believe that "many eyeballs" can turn up prior art that might not be found even by professional searchers. (And in fact, I've continued to get submissions from random users long after the BountyQuest 1-click bounty had been awarded. Some of them seem pretty conclusive to me. But the real lesson I learned from my own experience putting up a bounty is that it's useless for a third party to do this. It's got to be one of the parties to the dispute who does it, or else there's no assurance that the prior art that's collected is relevant to the legal approach being pursued, or the business objectives of the parties.
Simson is currently writing an advanced Cocoa Programming book (partly based on his old NextStep manual). It should be out from O'Reilly in May.
A second edition of Learning Cocoa should be out at the same time.
Sounds Derivative of Tykwer's Winter Sleepers
on
Review: Memento
·
· Score: 1
I haven't seen this movie; first heard of it from an NPR interview with the director. As I heard him talking about a character with no short term memory, I thought "Cool, this must be Tom Tykwer, the director of Run Lola Run and Winter Sleepers" (since Winter Sleepers is all about a character having no long term memory.
Winter Sleepers was just recently released in the US, but I think it was actually filmed before Run Lola Run.
I'll have to see Memento and see how it compares. Those of you who've seen Memento ought to check out Winter Sleepers. Like Run Lola Run, it's a top-notch film.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got to be kidding that I'm channelling Stallman. He's finally waking up to an issue that I put in front of him all the way back in 1999. At the time, he said "It didn't matter." See for yourself, in the transcript of our interchange at the 1999 Wizards of OS conference in Berlin. They are a fair way through the PDF of the transcript, so read on down: http://tim.oreilly.com/archives/mikro_discussion.pdf
At the time I was talking about "infoware" rather than "Web 2.0" but the concepts I was working with were in the same direction.
But in case you don't want to go through all that, here's the relevant bit:
Richard Stallman:
I came up to the mike again because I wanted to address
the topic that Tim O'Reilly raised. Some of you might know about our major
disagreements on other issues, but that's not what he spoke about. And I think that
this distinction between hardware and software and infoware is an interesting one
and that you addressed it very well from the open source point of view. That being
a matter of looking for a development methodology of making things that work and
judging success to a large extent in the same concept of market share or number of
users that is used as a criterion by the proprietary software developers. Now,
looking at that same concept, that same situation from the Free Software point of
view, I bring to this a different idea of goals and a different idea of a criterion.
The goal in the Free Software movement is to extend our freedom. 'Ours' meaning
that of whoever wants freedom to work together so that freedom spreads over a
wider range of activities. And so our criterion isn't really about market share, ever
and it's only secondarily about 'Do we have good technology, does the program
work reliably?' Obviously if it works badly enough it won't be useful, but otherwise
we can fix it, so that's just a side issue. The important thing is: How many activities
can we do without giving up our freedom? What is the range of things that we can
do on a computer which has just free software on it, where we don't have to
compromise our freedom to do any of those things?
Now when you apply this criterion to things like web servers that answer certain
kinds of questions for you, that communicate with you, you find an interesting
thing: a proprietary program on a web server that somebody else is running limits
his freedom perhaps, but it doesn't limit your freedom or my freedom. We don't
have that program on our computers at all, and in fact the issue of free software
versus proprietary arises for software that we're going to have on our computers and
run on our computers. We're gonna have copies and the question is, what are we
allowed to do with those copies? Are we just allowed to run them or are we allowed
to do the other useful things that you can do with a program? If the program is
running on somebody else's computer, the issue doesn't arise. Am I allowed to copy
the program that Amazon has on it's computer? Well, I can't, I don't have that
program at all, so it doesn't put me in a morally compromised position, the way I
would be if I were supposed to have a program on my computer and the law says I
can't give you a copy when you come visit me. That really puts me on the spot
morally. If a proprietary program is on Amazon's computer, that's Amazon's
conscience. Now I would like them to have freedom too. I hope they will want
freedom, and they will work with me so that we all get freedom, but it's not directly
an attack on you and me if Amazon has a proprietary program on their computer.
It's not crucially important to you and me whether Amazon uses a free operating
system like GNU plus Linux, or a free web server like Apache. I mean I hope they
will, I hope free software will be popular, but if they give up their freedom, that's
just a shame it's not a danger to us who want free
Not sure what you mean by the idea that we "play favorites" at O'Reilly. I'd love to hear details so I can respond.
I can respond to the idea that we pay the lowest royalty rate, and your ideas about ebooks.
It's true that some publishers have higher nominal royalty rates than we do, but most of them take big "reserves against returns" that mean that you actually get a lot less than you think you do. Or they have a higher rate for some sales, but a lower rate for others, such that your blended rate for all sales is much lower than you expect. We offer one rate for all sales. That's a feature, not a bug.
I'll also point out that a royalty is a percentage. A higher percentage of smaller sales is still less money last time I looked. And at O'Reilly, we have the highest revenue per title of any publisher except Microsoft Press (whose volumes are lower but prices are much higher.)
Regarding ebooks, it's an misconception that the costs are much lower for ebooks. The costs of printing, returns, and warehousing are only about 20% of our net dollars we get from books (or about 10% of the list price). (If you've done the math on the previous sentence, you see that the retailer gets at least half of the list price.) So the costs aren't all that much lower for ebooks. And the consumer is demanding the savings. Ebooks are generally sold at a significant discount off the print book price, so the net to the publisher (and author) is actually lower than for print books.
Meanwhile, having an aggressive program for ebooks means we've had to invest millions of dollars over many years to build the market. If you think that ebooks means just putting a pdf on your website, you're missing the boat. The differences between publishers in their ability to get ebook revenues are enormous. There are actually as many ebook channels to sell through now than print outlets. For us, Safari Books Online is the biggest, but Stanza on the iPhone is coming on strong, as is the Kindle, Scribd, with many others entering the market. (Safari is actually our second biggest revenue source after Amazon, ahead of Barnes & Noble. It's the only ebook channel right now that generates enough to make it one of our top ten revenue channels, though Stanza and direct ebook sales from oreilly.com are coming on strong.) Building channels like this costs money - big sales force etc. It's not actually the kind of low cost revenue people imagine.
In fact, if your publisher pays a significantly higher royalty for ebooks, it's likely that they are just treating ebooks as "gravy." If they don't take them seriously, neither should you. Ebook sales are now at least 20% of our total revenue and climbing. When they are 50% or more, you'll see all those publishers with outlandish ebook rates scrambling to
Tim O'Reilly here. I was alarmed by this comment, as I don't like to think that my marketing department sends out spam, so I forwarded this message on to the team. Here's the reply I got: "this person has posted this before. We've searched for his email with no luck. I responded to his comment previously on slashdot and asked for him to send me a copy of the email so we could research. He never replied. Instead of letting us fix it, he would rather be a troll."
I suspect, now that I look more carefully, that there's more than to it than trolling. I notice the link, "Find free books," the claim that we tried to send him a physics book, something we haven't yet published, and I suspect that it is the poster who is a spammer.
bcrowell - if this is a legitimate complaint, please send us a copy of the email you received from us, or your own email address, and we'll see if you've ever been on our list, and if so, make sure you aren't any more.
If not, this guy needs moderating down...
Bo Cowgill, who wrote the paper on Google's prediction market, will be talking about their project at our Money:Tech conference in New York Feb 6-7. See http://conferences.oreillynet.com/money2008 for details.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about parallels between Web 2.0 and Wall Street. Because of course, the stock market is one of the largest prediction markets of all.
But it doesn't end there. There are lots of fascinating things to learn by studying the parallels, including why Web 2.0 will turn away from aggregating public content to providing new ways for anonymized aggregation, why Google and other search engines will increasingly compete with the sites they index, and why web 2.0 companies might find new markets by providing insight -- or even new kinds of financial futures (see for example weatherbill.com) to financial markets.
So this post is perfectly timed. It's a collection of essays by leading software engineers about code they find especially beautiful.
h tml
Andy Oram, the editor, thought it would be poor form to make a post himself, but heck, I thought: this is very relevant. The table of contents for the book can be found at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046/toc.
It includes essays by Brian Kernighan, Jon Bentley, Tim Bray, Yukohiro Matsumoto, Simon Peyton-Jones, and many others. The code is intended not only to be beautiful but also instructive and in many cases re-usable.
We're hoping to build an ongoing site around the book so additional examples would be very welcome.
that he thought Bill Atkinson's MacPaint was the most beautiful program ever written. Hearing this, Andy Hertzfeld made it a priority to recover the source code from an old Macintosh diskette. He contacted me because he was a bit worried about Apple's reaction if he just released it on the net (since it was Apple property), and I advised him to get the Computer History Museum involved if he didn't want to take the risk. I believe that he donated the code, but I'm not sure what the Museum did to have it made available.
Anonymous coward --
This is Tim O'Reilly. You are misinformed. We never filed a lawsuit against Manning. We wrote them a letter asking them not to do books that were obviously trading on the association that we had built between animal book covers and technical topics. They understood the issue and changed their branding. The result: Manning came up with some original brands, that were not confusing, and have helped them to become more successful, with their own identity. Knockoffs are rarely as successful as the original.
Incidentally, Manning is now distributed by O'Reilly. If we had done them wrong, do you think this would be the case?
Well, actually, the company that coined the term blog did in fact trademark it. Have you ever heard of blogger.com (now owned by Google)?
This is Tim O'Reilly:
:-)
:-) Oh, and you should stop using Linux and Apache and Firefox, because Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, and Apache is a trademark of the Apache Software Foundation, and Firefox is a trademark of the Mozilla Foundation.
I'm not surprised that theodp would submit this story, but I'm surprised that slashdot would run it. O'Reilly files trademarks is news? Especially trademarks that we filed over ten years ago?
A little bit of background on the specific trademark applications cited, either in the story or in the comments:
The trademark for Website -- which was, incidentally, the first Windows-based web server, back in 1995 -- was for a particular graphic mark -- the name website in red letters in a yellow oval in a kind of superman logo. It was not for generic use of the term.
I don't remember the trademark application for netizens (it was back in 1994), but I believe it was a joint project with the folks who originated the term to create an online directory of net citizens -- and was specific to that use.
Similarly, people commenting in the thread brought up the O'Reilly trademarks on animal book covers. Once again, people don't understand the concept of a trademark. It's not for any animal on the cover of a book, it's for a specific animal in a specific context -- say, the camel for Perl.
And as to the people who say, "O'Reilly shouldn't have exclusive rights to that association between perl and the camel, and the right to say who can use it", I say, "why not?" Is there any conceivable reason for the camel to be associated with Perl besides the fact that it first appeared on our book cover?
The fact that the images are public domain (and not all are) is completely irrelevant. The words used in most trademarks are also in the public domain. It's their particular context and field of use that gives them protection. Nike means victory in Greek. But in athletic shoes, it means one particular brand of shoes, because someone made that association, which didn't exist before, through their commercial activity.
For what it's worth, here are some common words that are in fact trademarked for a particular field of use:
Apple - for personal computers
Oracle - for databases
Windows - for operating systems
Red Hat - for versions of Linux
salesforce.com - for CRM systems
for Dummies - books for people who need to understand the basics of a new field (e.g. trademarks
Oh, and by the way, slashdot (/., btw, which is a common "word" in Unix/Linux shell speak) and sourceforge are both trademarks of VA. So if you want to boycott anyone who has trademarks, you should start by boycotting this thread
I don't think that O'Reilly's use of trademarks is any different than the use by folks like these.
While we began our animal covers using Dover clip art, we didn't end there. We now have a large collection of 19th century books containing original woodcuts (the same source that Dover used to build their collections). In addition, a number of the illustrations are contemporary. We have found people (notably Lorrie Lejeune) who were able to make pen and ink images that matched the woodcut style. See if you can identify the contemporary images without looking at the Colophon...
The travel books are not published by O'Reilly itself, but by another company I started called Travelers Tales. See http://www.travelerstales.com./
I like to think they are pretty good - they've won lots of awards and get the same kind of glowing praise from their readers as our technical books.
They aren't guidebooks per se, but rather collections of stories about places, to give you an idea of what the place is like before you go, or if you're just an armchair traveler.
I was glad to see that the moderator at least labeled the "dept" correctly -- but I wish that slashdot wasn't reduced to posting flamebait in order to drive traffic.
Theodp did indeed submit what he thought was prior art to the bountyquest 1-click competition -- he sent in a huge binder of IBM mainframe documentation without any comment about what part of it he considered prior art. When pressed for details, he gave some section numbers, but for the life of me I couldn't see its relevance, and neither could any of the bountyquest patent attorneys. It basically described a system in which you issued commands, and the computer responded! I think we all know a few of those. I gave him far more time and consideration than the actual merit of his submission required -- it seemed to me to be one of the most useless and irrelevant of all the submissions, yet he keeps claiming it as if it were the answer. Spending time answering his assertions seems only to have whetted his appetite for attention.
Theodp's accusations of malfeasance are particularly irritating because I did in fact pay out $10,000 of my own money for the three pieces of prior art that seemed most relevant. None of them were a slam dunk, though. (However, after the contest ended and BountyQuest went on the rocks, someone did send me a killer piece of prior art, which I still have in my possession in the event that Amazon ever sues anyone else over 1-click. I never used it because in the interim, Amazon settled with Barnes & Noble, and the case was put to bed. Meanwhile, I had become convinced that Amazon had seen the light (and the pressure -- suing B&N was a PR disaster for them) and would not again choose to use patents offensively.
As to acquiring patents (however ridiculous), the system is so broken that all companies are doing it these days, so that they'll have some defense if someone else sues them. Amazon is no worse in this regard than anyone else, and I believe that because of their bad experience, they are likely a lot better. They understand in a way they never did before that they are part of a technology ecosystem, and owe a lot to the open source and open standards developer community who created their opportunity. The Amazon web services interface is a direct outcome of what they learned through their mistakes over the offensive use of the 1-click patent, and the conversations about "giving back" that ensued.
The fact that BountyQuest failed was a big disappointment both to me and to Jeff -- it seemed like a good idea. But like many other startups in the dotcom era, it didn't make it over the hump.
I've always thought that the discussion of the success or failure of ebooks turns on a false premise -- namely that an ebook is some fairly exact electronic simulacrum of a printed book. In fact, any time you move to a new medium, the possibilities expand and morph. A movie is not a camera pointed at a stage play. Once you have that perspective, you might categorize EverQuest as an electronic fantasy novel? It's far more an "ebook" to my mind than a copy of Lord of the Rings reproduced in PDF on screen. Take advantage of the medium.
Moving to my own field of reference works, I've always argued that successful ebooks will be larger or smaller than printed books, with the "ebook" an interface to a back end database that lets you get bits or buckets as you need them. For example, O'Reilly's online publishing efforts have focused on creating short articles (viz. www.oreillynet.com and affiliated sites), and a large database of technical content (safari.oreilly.com). Safari now contains more than 3000 titles from O'Reilly, Pearson (AW, Peachpit, et al), and Microsoft Press. Advantages of the database approach include searching across the complete corpus, annotation, and the like. But that's just the beginning. The kinds of services that you can start to build when you have that database in place start to get really interesting. We're planning on launching some of those services next year.
I've been following it ever since he first did Netscan back at UCLA. In fact, I used Netscan to do the statistics for the Esther Dyson Release 1.0 issue on open source in 1998, projecting the relative size of open source communities by comparing their usenet footprint (as well as other stats, like size of conferences and mailing lists.)
We had Marc do a presentation on what he's doing at the last O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, and it was very well received. Marc's at Microsoft Research, and he's a guy slashdotters would all relate to if you actually knew him.
I'm puzzled. Theodp has sent me this stuff before, always claiming that it is prior art for one-click, but at least based on the materials submitted, I don't see it. Maybe you guys who know more about the system in question see this as prior art. But can you please explain? There's nothing in the documentation that gives any insight into what results are produced by the various actions described here. From the manual, it might just run a batch job, or move you to another screen. For this to be considered as prior art, it would seem to me that it would require some evidence that the actions in question were to purchase something. And I don't see that here. Where are you guys seeing that?
It has nothing to do with confidence in open source. My point is that hacking will eventually stop being fun in many areas that are now the heartland of the open source movement. All the interesting problems will have been solved *in that area* and so the hackers will move on to new areas.
Meanwhile, you have only to look at the way that folks like Red Hat are trying to gain increasing control over their users to see the commercial dynamics that I'm talking about. RH as a commercial business isn't that different from a proprietary software company -- you should have seen Robert Lefkowitz (r0ml)'s talk at OScon, where he compared Red Hat's P&L to Borland's -- and you could see that from a financial pov they were nearly identical, except that what Borland called "licenses", Red Hat called "subscriptions." Leading r0ml to a wonderful slide called "Sharia Compliant Mortgages", which showed some of the creative accounting used in Islamic countries to get around the Islamic law prohibition on charging interest.
These things are always more complex than they appear. No simple answers. But that's what makes it fun.
Open source is great, but the choice between open and proprietary is not going to end up with an either-or solution.
You say: "The thing that struck me about the article is that he just now figured out what's going on."
Actually, I started talking about all this in 1997. See http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource/, and scroll to the bottom. (It's in reverse chronological order.) My very first talk on open source software was on this same topic.
Obviously, all the value in software isn't going to go away, any more than all the value went out of hardware with the introduction of the commodity PC. But I try to remind people of Ray Kurzweil's comment: "I'm an inventor, and I started studying long term trends, because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started."
I believe that we're entering a period with just as much positive disruption to the computer industry as the one that started with the introduction of the IBM PC. I'm not "redefining" software to fit my prejudices, just pointing out that as certain types of software are being commoditized, value is pushed "up the stack" to services, and that we need to broaden our idea of what those services might be, and the role that open source plays in them.
This isn't just about sites like Amazon and EBay, but about those sites as harbingers of a future in which everything is connected, and software migrates away from the individual client computer.
This wasn't really a "prediction" -- I was just trying to think of something outrageous that would get across the idea that some of these vertical market web sites might eventually grow so important as to overshadow current market leaders, just as little Microsoft grew to dominate the market in a way that IBM never imagined in 1982.
I didn't say that Amazon web services, BARWN, Xbox hardware hacking, or MMORPGs were "the next killer app." What I said was that all these things were on my radar, and why. My point was not to pick the most important things out there, but to pick four things that people might not view in the same context, and to identify the common element that put them on my radar: They represent the hacker impulse, people pushing the boundaries of a system and coming up with innovations that the original creators didn't imagine. I outlined some of the key elements that put technologies on my radar: hackability, being in line with some major trend (such as the increase in ubiquitous networking), disruptive potential, grassroots enthusiasm rather than top-down corporate promotion but still the presence of professional practitioners and a possible business ecology.
There are many other technologies that are also on my radar. I chose these four to highlight precisely because they seem so disjoint, yet to me show all of the characteristics that I outlined above, the characteristics that make a technology worth following by O'Reilly.
Actually, the brief report didn't quite capture the thrust of my remarks (which will be up in some form on oreillynet.com within a day or two).
My point was this: if you look at the "alpha geeks", you often can see the shape of the future long before it's obvious in the commercial market. This was true with the PC (which was derided as a toy by the establishment), with the web (ditto), and so on with many new technologies.
Hackers push the envelope to make technologies do what they want before vendors and entrepreneurs package them for other people. My point is that a lot of the things that the hackers and other alpha geeks have been incorporating into their lifestyle for some time - wireless, chat, web services (even if only created by web spidering and screen scraping), peer-to-peer (rendezvous), etc. - are all starting to show up in a nice package.
So to me, this is a good predictor that Apple is really on the right track.
The second part of the talk was somewhat unrelated. It was advice for the future based on what has been successful for Unix, the internet, and open source.
As it turns out, autonomous computing is one of the trends we're following closely at O'Reilly. It's one of the major themes at our emerging technology conference (Building the Internet Operating System) in Santa Clara May 13-16. Robert Morris of IBM is giving a keynote on the subject, and we've got a whole subtrack on biological models for computation. "Emergence" is also the theme of Steven Johnson's keynote.
Overall, if you look at some of what's been happening in the peer-to-peer space (with decentralization@yahoogroups.com being a great place to do that), you'll see how all these themes are coming together with the emergence of new internet-scale operating system models.
First, let me also point out that theodp, who submitted this story, has been on a quest to discredit BountyQuest ever since his submission of supposed prior art on the 1-click patent was not chosen for a share of the $10,000 bounty we awarded. He sent in hundreds of pages of material without any explanation of what particular part of it invalidated the patent, and all of those who looked at it couldn't see the remotest relevance. Requests for clarification about just what in this material represented prior art were met with avoidance and hostility. His continued harrassment of both me and BountyQuest has convinced me that he's some kind of a crank. I was disappointed to see Salon picking up his sour grapes as part of his story, and then to see him spinning this further for Slashdot.
Second, while I admire Greg Aharonian for his relentless advocacy of a better patent system, his comments that "BountyQuest is a joke" need to be taken with a grain of salt. They are in fact competitors, using different mechanisms to reach the same goal. Both provide "market mechanisms" to find prior art that potentially can be used to invalidate or confirm patents. Where I do agree with Greg is that requiring applicants to search for prior art is exactly the right thing to do. And it's exactly what I recommended in my own patent advocacy.
Third, there were numerous inaccuracies and flawed conclusions in the Salon story, ranging from the trivial (I collected 10,000 signatures in three days on my anti-1-click petition, not 3500) to the fundamental.
For example, Amazon licensing the InTouch patent doesn't mean that no successful prior art was found. Because these kind of settlements are made behind closed doors, it may be just as likely that Amazon found killer prior art, and that InTouch paid their court costs or did some other kind of swap in order to preserve the fiction that they have a valid patent. I'm not saying that that's what happened, but we have just as much evidence for that statement as was presented for the idea that no prior art was found.
The Salon story suggests that the BountyQuest approach of searching for prior art via Internet bounties is "a joke" because the prior art they found may not have been used in a couple of cases. This is like saying that the open source process is a joke because every patch that's submitted isn't used.
There used to be a mock Tarot deck called Morgan's Tarot, which had a card that said, "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." Dealing with lawyers is like that. I talked with the lawyers in the Barnes & Noble vs. Amazon case, and they really weren't interested in outsiders sticking their nose into their case. So many of these things are handled outside the public view.
The fact that BountyQuest hasn't done as well as expected has as much to do with the funding drought from the high-tech meltdown as from a fundamental failure in its business model. I still believe that "many eyeballs" can turn up prior art that might not be found even by professional searchers. (And in fact, I've continued to get submissions from random users long after the BountyQuest 1-click bounty had been awarded. Some of them seem pretty conclusive to me. But the real lesson I learned from my own experience putting up a bounty is that it's useless for a third party to do this. It's got to be one of the parties to the dispute who does it, or else there's no assurance that the prior art that's collected is relevant to the legal approach being pursued, or the business objectives of the parties.
Simson is currently writing an advanced Cocoa Programming book (partly based on his old NextStep manual). It should be out from O'Reilly in May.
A second edition of Learning Cocoa should be out at the same time.
Winter Sleepers was just recently released in the US, but I think it was actually filmed before Run Lola Run.
I'll have to see Memento and see how it compares. Those of you who've seen Memento ought to check out Winter Sleepers. Like Run Lola Run, it's a top-notch film.