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Interview: Tim O'Reilly Answers
from the man-behind-the-animal-covers dept.
Dominican asks:
How often are books revised? Open to the author?
Tim responds:
In our early days, we revised our books constantly. For example, I did
ten editions of Managing UUCP and Usenet between 1986 and 1991--about
one every six months. The book grew in something much like an open
source software process, where I was constantly incorporating reader
feedback, and rolling it into the next printing. We didn't do a big
marketing push about it being a new edition, we just had a change log on
the copyright page, much like you do with a piece of software, each time
you check it in and out of your source code control system.
Now that we're much larger (and many of our authors no longer work directly for us), it's harder to do that, but we still roll in a lot of small changes each time we go back to print.
The reason why it's harder mainly has to do with the inefficiency of retail distribution. When there are thousands of copies sitting in bookstores waiting to be bought, rolling out a "new edition" is a big deal, since you have to take back and recycle all the old ones. So you have to go through a process of letting the inventory "stored in the channel" thin out. This means that, especially for a very successful book, you can't do updates as often as you otherwise might like. We slipstream in fixes to errors and other small changes, but major changes need to be characterized as a "new edition" with all the attendant hoopla.
There is also the issue you advert to in your question, and that is the availability of the author to do the update. Sometimes an author like David Flanagan has a number of bestselling books, and he updates them in round-robin fashion. Sometimes an author loses interest in a topic, or gets a new job and doesn't have time any more, and we have to find someone else. Sometimes the technology is fairly stable, and so we don't need to do a new edition.
Sometimes we know we need a new edition, but we just get distracted, and don't get around to it as quickly as we should! At least we don't do what a lot of other publishers do, which is issue a "new edition" for marketing reasons only, where the content stays pretty much the same, but it's called a new edition just so they can sell it in freshly to bookstores.
t-money asks:
Fatbrain.com has recently announced that it will offer an
electronic publishing service, E-matter. What do you think
about offering documents for download for a fee? Is this
something that O'Reilly might be undertaking in the
future?
Tim responds:
Well, we were part of FatBrain's ematter announcement, and we're going
to be working with them. But I have to confess that the part of their
project I liked the best wasn't the bit about selling short documents in
online-only form, it was the idea of coordinating sale of online and
print versions.
I know that there's a lot of talk about putting books up online for free, and we're doing some experiments there, but to be honest, I think that it's really in all of our best interests to "monetize" online information as soon as possible. Money, after all, is just a mutually-agreed ratio of exchange for services. When the price is somewhere between zero and a large number, based on negotiation, the uncertainty often means that the product is not available.
In general, I foresee a large period of experimentation, until someone or other figures out the right way to deliver AND pay for the kinds of things that people want to read online. We've seen it take about five years to develop enough confidence in advertising as a revenue model for the web (starting from our first-ever internet advertising on O'Reilly's prototype GNN portal in early 1993). Similarly, I think that the "pay for content" sites--whether eMatter or ibooks.com, or books24x7, or itknowledge.com--will take some time to shake out. Meanwhile, we're playing with a bunch of these people, and doing some experiments of our own as well.
the_tsi asks:
Not to start a free SQL server war here, but I notice
there is a (quite good) book on mSql and MySql, but nothing
for PostgreSQL. Are there any plans to cover it in the near
future?
Tim responds:
We're looking at this but haven't started any projects yet. We've had a
huge number of requests for a book on PostgreSQL, and we're taking them
very seriously.
Tet asks:
You've said that the Linux Network Administrator's Guide
sold significantly less than would normally be expected as a
result of the text of the book being freely available on the
net. By what sort of margin? How many copies did it sell,
and how many would you have expected to sell under normal
circumstances? Would you release another book in a similar
manner if the author accepts that they'll make less money
from it? Did the book actually make a loss, or just not make
as much profit as expected?
Tim responds:
Well, it's always hard to say what something *would* have done if
circumstances had been otherwise. But on average, the book sold about a
thousand copies a month in a period where Running Linux sold 3-4000 and
Linux Device Drivers about 1500. Now the book is badly out of date
(though a new edition is in the works), but you'd expect that there are
more people doing network admin than there are writing device drivers.
(And in fact, reader polls have actually put the NAG at the top of the
list of "most useful" of our Linux books.)
Frank Willison, our editor in chief, made the following additional comments about the NAG and its free publication:
"We can demonstrate that we lost money because another publisher (SSC) also published the same material when it became available online. Because the books were identical, word for word (a requirement the author put on anyone else publishing the material), every copy sold of the SSC book was a loss of the sale of one copy of our book.One interesting side note was that SSC published the book for a lower price than we did. Of course, we had the fixed costs: editing, reviewing, production, design. But those fixed costs didn't make the difference: when you took out the retail markup, the difference in price was equal to the author royalty on the book.
The above may be too much info, and isn't directly related to current Open Source practices, but it still chafes my butt."
If I had to quantify the effect, I'd guess that making a book freely available might cut sales by 30%. But note that this is for O'Reilly--we've got books with a great reputation, which makes people seek them out. And we cover "need to know" technologies where people are already looking for the O'Reilly book on the topic. For J. Random Author out there, open sourcing a book might be a terrible idea, or a great one. An author with some unique material that doesn't fall into an obvious "I already know I need this" category can build a real cult following online, and then turn that into printed book sales to a wider audience. We're hoping to do the same thing in publishing Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar (and other essays) this fall. Most of you guys have probably read them online, but there is a larger population who've probably heard the buzz, and will pick them up in the bookstore. On the other hand, an author who puts a lousy book online will only show this to the world, and sales will be 10% of what they'd been if the reader hadn't been able to see the book first.
Perhaps more compelling is the evidence from the Java world, where sales of the Addison-Wesley books based on the Sun documentation (which is mostly available online) are quite dismal, while our unique standalone books (as those from other publishers) do quite well. More importantly, though, programmers in our focus groups for Java report spending far less overall on books than programmers in other areas, because they say that they get most of the info they need online.
All of this is what tells me we need to tread carefully in this area, since I have to look out for the interests of my employees and my authors as well as my customers. In the end, free books online may look like a great deal, but it won't look so good if it ends up disincetivizing authors from doing work that you guys need.
And frankly, we have conversations all the time that go like this: "I'm making $xxx as a consultant. I'd love to write a book, but it's really not worth my while." At O'Reilly, we try to use authors who really know their stuff. So writing a book is either a labor of love, or it's a competitive situation with all the other things that author could be doing with their time. So money is an issue.
maelstrom asks:
(two out of three submitted) What books would you
recommend a budding writer should read and study? and
Do you read every book you publish?
Tim responds:
Books about writing that I like are Strunk & White (The Elements of
Style) and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. But really, read any
books that you like. Reading good technical books, and thinking about
what works about them for you, is always great. We learn far more by
osmosis than by formal instruction. So read, and then write.
Going back to the recurrent questions about free documentation--a great way to learn to write is to do it. Contribute your efforts to one of the many open source software projects as a documentation writer, get criticism from the user community, and learn by doing.
I would say that the ability to organize your thoughts clearly is the most important skill for a technical writer. Putting things in the right order, and not leaving anything out (or rather, not leaving out anything important, but everything unimportant), is far more important than trying to write deathless prose. The best writing is invisible, not showy. My favorite quote about writing (which came from a magazine interview that I read many years ago) was from Edwin Schlossberg: "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think."
As to your second question: alas, I no longer have time to read everything we publish. We have a number of senior editors whose work I trust completely -- I never read their stuff unless I'm trying to use it myself. For new or more junior editors, I generally do a bit of a "sample" of each book somewhere during the development process. If I like it, I say so, and don't feel I have to look at it again. If I don't like it, I may make terrible trouble, as some of my editors and authors can attest.
howardjp asks:
One of the biggest compaints aong critics of the BSD
operating systems is the lack of available books. Since
O'Reilly is the leader in Open Source documentation, you are
well positioned to enter the BSD market. With that
in mind, why hasn't O'Reilly published any BSD books in
recent memory?
Tim responds:
Every once in a while we make a stupid editorial decision, as, for
instance, when we turned down Greg Lehey's proposed BSD book (now
published by Walnut Creek CDROM). This was based on the fact that the
BSD documentation, which we'd co-published with Usenix, had done really
poorly, and the relative sales of our original BSD UNIX in a Nutshell
relative to our System V/Solaris one. That was many years ago now, and
BSD has emerged from the shadows of the AT&T lawsuit, and become a real
force in the open source community. So I definitely think that there
are some books that we might want to do there. Proposals are welcome.
That being said, so many of our books cover BSD (just like they cover Linux, even if they don't say Linux on the cover). After all, BSD is one of the great mothers of the open source movement. What is Bind, what is sendmail, what is vi, what is a lot of the TCP/IP utility suite but the gift of BSD...it's so much part of the air we all breathe that it doesn't always stand out as topic that gets the separate name on it.
chromatic asks:
Would you ever consider making previous editions of
certain books free for download when supplanted by newer
editions?
For example, when Larry Wall finally gets around to writing the 3rd edition of the Camel (probably about the same time as Perl 6), would you consider making the second edition available in electronic format?
I realize this has the possibility of forking documentation, but it's hard to find anyone more qualified than Larry, Randal, and Tom, for example. It would only work for certain books.
Tim responds:
The previous edition of CGI Programming for the WWW is available
online now, while we work on a new edition, as is MH & xmh and Open
Sources. You can read these at
http://www.oreilly.com/openbooks/.
We'd
like to put more of our out of print books online, but it's a matter of
man
hours. Our Web team is organizing a new effort around this now, so look
for
more books to appear on this page.
And in fact, an awful lot of Programming Perl *is* available for free online, as part of the Perl man page or other perl documentation. It's not available in exactly the same form, but it's available. That's one of the big questions for online documentation: does the online version always look like the print version.
But this is a good question, and it's one we have certainly something we can think about. Might be another interesting experiment in understanding the ecology of online publishing.
Crutcher asks:
Not sure how to phrase this, but, well, what is the
status of O'Reilley and marketing books to schools and
colleges for use as textbooks. Our textbooks suck, and if
there textbook versions of ya'lls books it would rock.
Tim responds:
We actually do quite a bit of marketing to schools and colleges, and
they are used as textbooks in a number of places. If you know of a
professor who ought to be adopting an O'Reilly book, please send mail to
our manager of college and library sales, Kerri Bonasch, at
kerri@oreilly.com. We also have a Web site to support this effort at
http://www.oreilly.com/sales/edu/.
Are there any specific things that you see as obstacles to use of the books as textbooks? What topics would you especially like to see as textbooks?
zilym asks:
Are there any plans to improve the binding on your future
books? Many of us use O'Reilly books to death and the
binding is the first to go. I know I certainly wouldn't mind
pay slightly more for a stronger version of some of the most
heavily used titles.
Tim responds:
Hmmm. We use a special high-cost binding, which allows the books to lay
flat. It's quite a bit more expensive than the normal perfect binding
used by most publishers, and we think it's worth it. I have heard lots
of compliments on how great this binding is. I haven't heard complaints
about it breaking down--at least not without use that would break down a
normal perfect-bound book as well. I don't know of any way to make it
more durable.
Maybe hardcover? It would be great to have a slashdot poll on how many people share your problem and would like to see O'Reilly books in hardcover. (One caveat: We tried an experiment once (for our Phigs Programming Manuals--real behemoths) to offer books in both hardcover and softcover, so people could choose. Despite polls that said people would pay more for a more durable hardcover, everyone bought the softcover to save the difference in price.) So, if there is a poll, how much would you pay for a more durable book?
jzawodn asks:
Given some of the recent discussion surrounding the Linux
Documentation Project (LDP), I began to wonder about its
long-term direction and viability.
I "grew up" with Linux by reading *many* of the HOWTOs and other documents that were part of the LDP. In many ways, I'd have been lost without the LDP. But with the growth of Linux mind-share and increased demand for texts that help newcomers get acquainted with the various aspects of running their own Linux systems, there seems to have been a stagnation in much of the free documentation. I can't help but to wonder if many of the folks who would be working on LDP-type material have opted to write books for publishers instead.
Where do you see free documentation projects like the LDP going? What advice can you offer to the LDP and those who write documents for inclusion in the project? Might we see electronic versions of O'Reilly books (or parts of them) included in free documentation projects?
Tim responds:
I don't think that the slowdown of the LDP is because of authors
deserting it to write commercial books. In fact, I think you're going
to see a reinvigoration of free documentation efforts, as publishers try
to contribute to these projects. I think that the right answer is for
those who are writing books to figure out some useful subset of their
work that will be distributed online as part of the free documentation,
and for there to be some added value only available in books. I think
that this has worked pretty well for the core perl documentation, where
an update to the camel and an update to the online docs are really seen
as part of the same project.
When O'Reilly is directly involved in an Open Source project, this is fairly typical of what we do. For example, O'Reilly was one of the original drivers behind the development of the docbook DTD, which is now used by the LDP. (We started the Davenport Group, which developed Docbook, back in the late 80's.)
We're releasing a book about Docbook, by Norm Walsh and Len Muellner, called DocBook: the Definitive Guide." It will be out in October. Norm and Len's book will be also available for free online through the Oasis web site as the official documentation of the DocBook DTD. This is our contribution to users of DocBook; without our signing and creating this book, good documentation for DocBook wouldn't exist. (This is in addition to our historical support of the creation of DocBook.)
Our goal here, though, is evangelical. We want more people to use docbook (and xml in general), and we think that making the documentation free will help that goal.
CmdrTaco asks (on behalf of a friend):
I understand from a very reliable source that O'Reilly is
moving their website from a single Sun and an inside
developed webserver to an NT cluster and some barely
functioning proprietary software. Their bread and butter
has been Unix. They have been taking a more and more vocal
position within the OSS community. Why are they switching to
NT?
Tim responds:
Well, your very reliable source has only part of the story right, and
that's because it's a long and involved story. It started about 18
months ago, when the people on our web team wanted to replace what had
become a fairly obsolete setup whose original developers no longer work
for the company.
This system--which was about five years old--involves a lot of convoluted perl scripts that take data in a pseudo-sgml format, and generate a bunch of internal documents (marketing reports, sales sheets, copy for catalogs etc) as well as web pages. We wanted to do something more up to date, and didn't have internal resources to devote to a complete rework.
So we went out to a number of web design firms for bids. The winning firm does work on both NT and UNIX, but they showed us all kinds of nifty things that they said they had already developed on NT that we could use. These were tools for surveys, content management, etc. There was also stuff around integration with the spreadsheets and databases and reports used by our financial and customer service people. To recreate these tools on their UNIX side would cost several hundred thousand dollars.
So I said: "We can either walk the talk, or talk the walk. I don't care which, as long as what we do and what we say line up. If you can do it better and cheaper on NT, go ahead and do it, and I'll go out there and tell the world why the NT solution was better."
I was prepared to have to tell a story about interoperability--after all, despite all our efforts to champion open source, we realize that our customers use many, many different technologies, and we try to use them all ourselves as well. We were looking at doing some things on NT--the stuff our vendor said they already had working--while incorporating other elements on UNIX, Mac, Linux, and Pick (yes, we run a Pick system too!). The whole thing was going to be a demonstration of ways that you can choose from and integrate tools from many different platforms.
Instead, I have to tell the story that is so familiar to Slashdot readers, of promises of easy-to-use tools that, unfortunately, don't work as advertised. As your source suggests, the NT parts of the system haven't been delivered on time or on budget, and what we've seen doesn't appear to work, and we're considering scrapping that project and going back to the safe choice. To put a new spin on an old saw: No one ever got fired for using open source.
I say that tongue-in-cheek of course, because unlike a lot of open source partisans, I don't think that all good things come from the open source community. We like to bash Microsoft with the idea that "no matter how big you are, all the smart people don't work for you" but it's just as true that they don't all work for the open source community either. There are great ideas coming from companies like Sun and Microsoft, and (most of) the people who work there are just like us. They care about doing a good job. They want to solve interesting problems and make the world a better place. And sometimes they do.
I consider it my job to give them a fair shake at convincing me, and if they do, to give you a fair shake at learning what they've done right as well as what they've done wrong. I'll keep you posted.
Good advice... (Score:3)
A further suggestion on my part would be for aspiring authors to find out what THEY like to read, and try to figure out what about the style impresses them.
--
Contest? (Score:3)
Thanks Tim! (Score:4)
Use of ORA books as textbooks (Score:3)
What's interesting is that some places are beginning to use their books. For instance, as a newbie to Perl, I'm taking the HWG.org [hwg.org] class starting on Sept 20, for Beginning Programming with Perl [hwg.org], which uses the ORA Learning Perl book that's so popular with slashdotters. From a cursory glance through some of the other courses, there do appear to be some of ORA's excellent books used as texts. There's hope after all!
Open content and the NAG (Score:4)
That said, I do believe there *is* a way to do business with open content, and that is to run a printing/binding service for open content material with direct distribution. I don't know that ORA is really the one to do that sort of thing, but it could work. The disadvantages of non-exclusivity might be compensated by the lack of need for large inventories; the consumer would get valuable reference work, possibly with high-quality production values, bound to order as most convenient (wire bound, cloth bound, whatever.)
This would be a good very-small, one-to-three person sort of business, that could even be run without facilities - a web-based order form and a high-end copy shop are all that are needed.
(I must admit to having violated one of my own cautions - avoid *anyone* who tells you "you could make a lot of money if..." unless they're stinking rich. And even then, be careful.)
Re:Where are my questions? (Score:4)
Now, specifics: two out of the three questions you asked were duplicated in essence, if not in exact wording, by others, and were answered. One, about why computer books cost so much, was a good, but other questions from other people were also good.
We are getting a huge (and growing) response to these interviews. You simply need to accept the fact that not all questions are going to get passed on, and no matter which ones we (Slashdot editors) select, *someone* is going to feel left out.
- Robin
PS - my personal favorite questions don't always get forwarded, either. Such is life.
Mr. O'Reilly, how about a subscription service? (Score:4)
Could third-party support organizations such as Linuxcare serve as resellers? The idea of having Fatbrain, as you might have suggested, offer something like Microsoft's TechNet subscription plan for *nix technologies is appealing to me. In fact, I'll promise my subscription to you if it's less than $500 per year.
Softcover vs. hardcover (Score:4)
Ah, see, you have to remember that you're selling to computer geeks. They want to be able to buy the softcover, then upgrade to the hardcover when the softcover wears out.
Textbook needs (Score:3)
You asked what would be needed in textbooks that
isn't already provided. The main thing I see
lacking is a structured problem/answer set for
each topic discussed. Often professors don't have
the time to make good homework for each chapter so
they refer to the textbook, textbooks which get
updated often. A good perl book with programming
problems designed by Larry would be a great
learning guide, and since the problems would need
to change every couple of semesters you would
automatically have some push to keep the books up
to date.
A side effect is that students won't be so quick
to return books for the measly refund at the end
of the semester if the textbook they learned from
is also the defacto open source quide to perl. I
don't think non-students would mind a few lesson
pages at the end of each chapter either, we've all
become used to the read a chapter do the problems
way of learning (For good or bad).
Re:Hardcover vs. Softcover (Score:3)
I found this:
Publishing A book which sells for $40 can be produced at a marginal cost of $2. This gap between price and marginal cost has led to a variety of forms of differential pricing. Book clubs, hardcover and paperback editions, and remaindered books are all examples of the ways that the product characteristics and adjusted to support differential pricing.
here [firstmonday.dk]. That doesn't make it true, but it sounds reasonable.
"Price discrimination" and "differential pricing" seem to be the keywords.
I was thinking that O'Reilly could attempt to build (even more) customer loyalty by not trying to use price discrimination.
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:3)
You mean "walk the talk" :-) Anyways, I think we can forgive him this one time. He tried what he thought was the most feasible solution at the time and he honestly admitted that it failed. Linux didn't provide the solution at the time and that was a failure too. We have to remember that although Linux is a superior solution to NT, it hasn't had the time to mature as NT has had. We need to get solutions on Linux so that in the future people *won't* be forced to use NT. We're not there yet, but every day I see more and more solutions for Linux. Let's keep working on them and soon one day the time well come when no one will be able to say, "The only way to do this was on NT".
-Brent--
Re:Hardcover vs. Softcover (Score:4)
That being said, the manufacturing cost is a relatively small part of the cost for any book, and hardcover does ncrease the cost significantly. Most publishers set the price as some multiple (in traditional publishing, at least in the old days, 6x, in computer book publishing, 15-20x) of the manufacturing cost. So if a paperback costs $2.50 to print and a hardback $3.50, you might expect the difference in price to be at most a few dollars, and then you find out it is $10 or $20 because of the multiplier.
A couple of provisos: even the most generous of publishers, who just wanted to offer hardcover as a service, would need to at least double the increase in cost, because the typical aggregate discount of 50% or more given to resellers means that the publisher will get only $1 for every $2 increase in price. What's more, the author royalty will be affected by that price increase, even though it has nothing to do with what's between the covers.
Even further, hardcovers take a lot longer to produce, and require you to inventory a lot more materials than paperback. So there are some hidden costs there as well.
When you look at all these factors, a price increase of $10 for hardcover over paperback is fairly typical. I'd imagine that you could get by with a $5 spread, but you'd be taking extra risk for benefits that were passed along entirely to the consumer.
Re:A few points to make... (Score:4)
Let me take the points in order:
SGML vs. Framemaker: O'Reilly was pushing SGML before most of the world ever heard of it. We started the docbook effort in the late 80's, and have worked on it for the past ten years. That being said, we have a business to run, and a lot of the SGML tools just haven't cut it for producing books in a time and cost-effective manner. We found that we were delaying books a month or more to do them first in sgml, and then we had a format that authors couldn't update easily. With Frame, we could get the books out on time, and we could export them into formats that authors could easily update.
We have continued to push vendors to use SGML, and to develop better tools for SGML (and now xml), and are continually evaluating new ones as they come out. We convert from frame to sgml as needed, but we don't always use sgml as an entry format at this point.
I believe in using open standards, but even more, I believe in using what works, and in not being religious about that. I believe that over the long run, open is better, by an order of magnitude, but that doesn't mean that you don't need to mix and match. (I would lay odds that not even Red Hat and VA Systems use open source for their accounting systems, for instance.) Valuing openness doesn't mean being doctrinaire.
As to "despite many protests from people in the company they instead use framemaker", I think that a better description would have been "despite many protests from people in the company, they persisted in trying to do everything in sgml, until finally they compromised, and now use whatever tool is best for the job at hand." The order is completely reversed: we used homegrown sgml tools before we used frame, and we've continued to use and grow them (note the continued work on docbook) so that we can no longer use frame when they surpass it.
"There were also protests about the NT solution for web services." Damn right there were, and they started with me. But as I noted in my original response, I felt that if the people most closely involved felt they could do better with NT, I owed it to them to let them try. Meanwhile, we've continued to develop PACE (the Perl-based publishing system that we use for Web Review, perl.com, and xml.com) and use that heavily in other parts of the company.
That's something that people need to understand: how do you get good at doing books that answer real problems if you don't try to solve those problems yourselves? We try everything, and we try to figure out what works, and what doesn't. I wish we did more of that, not less.
And despite all the NT bashing that goes on in this group, there are advantages as well as disadvantages there. I like people who can understand that. (I was so heartened by seeing Miguel de Icaza, the architect of GNOME, learning everything he could from Dick Hardt (of ActiveState and Win32 Perl fame) about how Microsoft's object models work. You get better by studying everything.
"People had to fight tooth and nail to get Linux books published initially." What a load of BS! That's not just a misinterpretation, it's downright wrong. We published our first Linux books long before most of the people reading this posting had ever heard of Linux. We didn't do lots of books that said "Linux" on the cover because we already had books that covered the programs but said "UNIX" and we didn't see the need to re-issue them with the only addition being a new marketing spin.
There is one thing that *is* true, and it's something I still don't understand. Despite all the attention paid to Linux, Linux books haven't sold all that well up to now, at least relative to its market share. (Maybe it's all the good free online documentation.) Computer book retailers like SoftPro in Burlington MA make the same observation. We've emphasized open source technologies like Perl because people seem to buy more books, and that seemed to indicate a greater hunger for information! But this hasn't stopped us from doing any Linux books. (Actually, there's one we missed, due to a miscommunication with the editor, which was Troan's Linux Programming book.)
"rabid NT people in those hallowed halls seems like sacrilege." Get over it. One of the things I like to look for is passion and intelligence. I'll take a rabid NT hacker who knows his stuff over a second rate Linux hacker any day. The reason Linux is better than NT is because there are more great and rabid Linux people who like to share what they know than there are great and rabid NT people who can do the same. The culture of Linux is a culture of sharing, which makes it a more fun market to publish for, but at the end of the day, I want to help everyone make more out of their life with computers. And I find cool stuff everywhere. Linux, Perl, Web, PalmPilot, BeOS, Mac, you name it.
As Lao Tzu said:
"I find good people good, and I find bad people good, if I am good enough."
Find the good in whatever technology you need to use; cast out the bad, or try to improve it. But don't cast it out without looking at it. That's my guiding principle.