[ Thanks to R
McGuinness for this link. ]
“But moving on, starting about 1996 or 1997, I started to be
bothered by the discrepancy between what I saw in our book sales,
and what was being written about by the technology press, and in
particular, things came to a head for me around Perl. Our book,
Programming Perl, which we’d originally published in 1991, had
continued to grow in sales in 1994, ’95, ’96. With the web, it was
really exploding. In fact, the computer book buyer at Borders told
us that in 1996, Programming Perl was Borders’ most profitable book
in any category, and that was just really interesting for me,
because in that same time period, there was no mention of
Programming Perl in the computer trade press. Instead there was all
this talk about ActiveX, you know, Microsoft ActiveX, which nobody
used. And I decided I wanted to do something about that, so I
started talking more about Perl, and you know, I’d already been
talking about the Internet, so it was just an extension of talking
about the Internet, just saying, well, here are these interesting
technologies that are widely used on the Internet that nobody’s
talking about.”
“Anyway, in early 1998, I organised sort of small private
meeting of Open Source developers–at the time we were calling them
`Free Software’ developers–and the reason was also that in my work
of documenting a lot of these programs I realised that many of
these projects had a lot in common, but the people didn’t
necessarily know each other, they didn’t talk to each other. So I
knew a lot more of them than knew each other. Actually, going back
a bit, in 1997 we decided to hold a Perl Conference, and The Perl
Conference was a huge success and it was really exciting for me to
have all these developers who knew each other by email but had
never met in the flesh. So the Open Source Summit was really an
extension of what had happened at the Perl Conference; I went,
“Gosh, Linus and Larry Wall really ought to know each other”, you
know.“
Other recent Interviews:
Slashdot:
Interview: Eric S. Raymond Answers (Oct 01, 1999)
Linux Journal:
An Interview with Guido van Rossum (Sep 29, 1999)
Slashdot:
Interview: Havoc Pennington Answers (Sep 24, 1999)
Linuxcare:
Interview: Talking With Matt Welsh (Sep 13, 1999)
TechReview:
Interview with Don Knuth (Sep 08, 1999)
Slashdot:
Interview: Alan Cox Answers (Sep 03, 1999)
Audio Broadcast:
An Interview with Richard Stallman (Aug 31, 1999)
Linux.com:
Interview with Daniel M. Duley of KDE/MandrakeSoft (Aug 19,
1999)
The BBC
interviews Linus Torvalds (Audio) (Aug 02, 1999)