Perhaps more importantly, we read in a Spy magazine interview that appeared a few years back that the NCSA team that went on to create the Mosaic Web browser first learned of the Web from an O'Reilly brochure promoting Ed's book and the Web site we'd created to accompany it. Our publication of books like Programming Perl , DNS and Bind , Sendmail , and other classic titles on Open Source and internet-related software gave legitimacy to what had previously been an underground movement, and helped give early ISPs and Web sites the tools they needed to develop the rich, innovative culture, uncontrolled by major vendors, that has proven so productive in years since. The press conference after the event led to national publicity, including the famous issue of Forbes with Linus Torvalds on the cover, and full page photos of Brian Behlendorf, Larry Wall, and Richard Stallman in the interior spread. Somewhere along the way, we realized that our customers are changing the world, and that part of our job at O'Reilly is to help them think through the implications of the technologies they are unleashing. And it's only one of many technologies that will do so.
Some technologies are grassroots in their spread, and in the innovations they cause.
In cases like this, an information provider can have enormous impact. Where vendors spend millions marketing products, powerful ideas are passed from one user to another. When the word is spreading like that, we can provide the details to follow up the dream. To fail to comment on the outcome of that work, to fail to explore the forces of the market or of society that affect whether a technology succeeds or fails, or the extent to which it achieves its potential, would be to miss an enormous opportunity. In this regard, you might be interested in two pieces I've recently written.