Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Java and the Internet (part 2)

Posted on 14 Jul 2003 at 15:26

O'Reilly & Associates is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. To mark the event - and coinciding with a visit of Tim O'Reilly to London - we put the important questions to him regarding the battle between IBM and SCO, the fate of Linux, his involvement in the world of open source, and his love of science fiction...

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.