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Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Linux (part 1)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Java and the Internet (part 2)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on books (part 3)

According to a recent announcement from the Java One conference, O'Reilly is providing the infrastructure for the new Java.net portal, which aims to encourage and promote open source projects. What is the extent of O'Reilly's involvement and what are your thoughts about the site?

O'Reilly: java.net provides an independent meeting place for all of the companies and individuals that make up the Java developer community. It is the central location for developers to share ideas, related source code, documentation, and other development work based on Java technology.

O'Reilly is producing all the technical content for the site, including Java Today, a 'community newspaper' for Java developers. In addition to daily Java news that is collected by O'Reilly editors or submitted by the Java community, the site highlights the work of its members, and provide profiles of interesting projects and people.

O'Reilly is also managing the site's talkbacks, wikis, and blogs, which provide avenues for developers to connect with each other, get questions answered, and find collaborators. CollabNet, a company co-founded by O'Reilly and Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf, provides additional tools for project hosting and actual code development, including source code repositories, bug tracking, and other tools for collaborative software development.

And Sun benefits too...

O'Reilly: The benefits to Sun of partnering with O'Reilly to help build out their developer program are threefold:

First, they get our unmatched expertise in content development. For the past twenty-five years, we've been listening closely to developers and bringing them the information they need. We know that having the right information at the right time can make or break the adoption of a new technology.

Second, they get our reputation for independence and 'straight talk.' Many companies fail to engage developers because they hide behind a kind of 'marketing firewall,' which filters out controversy and replaces it with a bland party line. As Doc Searls said in the bestselling book, The ClueTrain Manifesto, 'markets are conversations.' We work to listen to both company and user concerns, and build trust by delivering the kind of information that allows users to work around problems while creating avenues for feedback that helps companies to make lasting improvements to their software.

Third, they get our ability to foster dialogue between developers, users, and even competitors. Sun's 'first among equals' approach to Java has been offputting to many potential partners. By engaging O'Reilly as a trusted third party and giving us editorial control over the site, Sun hopes to get more direct involvement by companies who feel that a Sun-dominated site has no room for their point of view. We aim to represent the entire Java community, not just Sun. In short, we're working with Sun to increase the openness of the Java community.

You have also been an activist for Internet standards. Of what work in this area are you most proud, and what has most recently engaged your attention?

O'Reilly: To me, the heart of the 'Internet standards' vision is John Postel's wonderful 'robustness principle' from RFC 761 (TCP): 'be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.' This is a software equivalent to the golden rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

An architecture that supports this idea of independent actors behaving in a cooperative manner was developed further in RFC 1122, Requirements of Internet Hosts:

'To improve robustness of the communication system, gateways are designed to be stateless, forwarding each IP datagram independently of other datagrams. As a result, redundant paths can be exploited to provide robust service in spite of failures of intervening gateways and networks.

All state information required for end-to-end flow control and reliability is implemented in the hosts, in the transport layer or in application programs. All connection control information is thus co-located with the end points of the communication, so it will be lost only if an end point fails.'<

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This is the principle that David Reed, Larry Lessig, and more recently Doc Searls have referred to as 'the end-to-end' principle. (See Doc's piece 'World of Ends', which is more approachable than David Reed's more technical discussions.) It is this principle, and the analogies between it and open source, that I refer to when I speak of myself as an activist for Internet standards. I want to see a world which maximizes openness, interoperability, and software cooperation rather than proprietary advantage and winner-takes-all markets.

So I'm not talking about specific formal standards so much as a mindset. And so, for example, I've tried to get the open-source community to understand that 'openness' means interoperability, low barriers to entry, low barriers to switching, as well as a requirement to redistribute source code. Open source is really a kind of insurance to help promote interoperability, rather than the other way around. If we have interoperability and low barriers to switching, we don't always need the source.

As noted above, my encouragement of Google and Amazon to offer web services, as a step towards making their applications into re-useable software components is something I'm very proud of. These are not yet 'standards', but they are an example of how I'm trying to take the Internet architecture to the next level of its evolution. See the article I cited earlier, 'The Network Really Is the Computer' for more on this subject.

I see from your official biography that you have served on the board of trustees for both the Internet Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. What has been your motivation for this work?

O'Reilly: In the case of both, I was motivated by the thought that 'we need a Sierra Club for the Internet.' I loved the open, cooperative nature of the early Net, and worried as I saw it become increasingly proprietary - something, incidentally, that Netscape started. I gave my first admonitory talk on the subject at the 1995 Australian Unix User Group conference when I realized that Netscape was setting out to own the web in the same way that Microsoft owned the desktop. Of course, Netscape lost that battle because Microsoft was better at that game than they were. But they started us down a slippery slope during the browser wars.

Of course, this event gave me one of my great examples of the power of open standards. While Netscape played the game of proprietary advantage and lost, going from a 90+ per cent share of the browser market down to 5 per cent, Apache, which has hewed to Internet standards (as well as open source) has held and even extended its market share.

But at any rate, I had hopes that I could help turn the Internet Society (ISOC) into something like the Sierra Club or other environmental organizations - groups that were able to make the point that there was a 'commons' at stake, an area that was not owned by any individual company or group, but by all of us collectively. As the organization that provided a legal umbrella to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet standards process, I hoped that ISOC would be able to take the moral high ground and stand up for Internet users as a class. I still think that the environmental movement has a lot to teach the Internet standards and free software communities about how to do effective political grassroots organizing.

Unfortunately, the Internet Society didn't seize the opportunity, and preferred at that time to remain a professional society for Internet developers and administrators. I believe that just recently they have come around to my point of view and are trying to increase their scope, but I believe that they missed the opportunity to gain massive membership in the early days of the Internet craze, a membership that would have given them a kind of clout that now belongs to large companies.

The EFF (www.eff.org) focuses more on civil liberties issues, of which there are also many. I remain a supporter of the group, but am no longer on the board. These non-profit boards take a lot of time, and I have found it more productive to do my own freelance activism in many cases.

Another related organization that I've been active in supporting is Larry Lessig's Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), an organization that is focused more broadly on making sure that we have a robust public domain, and that copyright and other forms of 'intellectual property protection' don't limit the free exchange of ideas, and the game of 'leapfrog' that most creative innovations depend on.

Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Linux (part 1)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Java and the Internet (part 2)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on books (part 3)