From: Jim Hill
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: Missing UNIX apps. for Palm
Nice to see that ORA's desertion of the UNIX community continues apace. On my home system, the prc-tools, pilot-link, and xcopilot (Experienced readers will recognize these as the software tools that went completely unmentioned in The Ultimate Guide) take up a bit less than 10 MB. The CD shipping with the book must be awfully good if they got it so jam-packed with WinMac stuff that no room was left for the UNIX folks.
Jim Hill
Jim,
We'd love to cover the UNIX tools in the second edition of the PalmPilot book. David Pogue is not a programmer, and didn't focus on UNIX because he doesn't know anything about it. None of our tech reviewers mentioned this stuff as important, so we didn't know to look for it.
We'd love to hear more about these UNIX tools. More than anything else, we'd need someone to contribute some information. (The programming chapter in the existing book was contributed by someone else rather than written by David Pogue, who is not a programmer.)
I'm sorry you read more into the omission than that.
If you think that I've "deserted" UNIX, what do you make of all the energy I've been putting into Perl and other open source software derived from UNIX? (Were you aware of the Perl Conference, the Open Source Developer's Day, the behind-the-scenes PR work we did to get Linus Torvalds on the cover of Forbes (with an inside pictorial spread about Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf of Apache, and other open source leaders). Not to mention new editions of many of our old standby UNIX books, as well as new books on subjects such as Samba, mysql, python, and tcl/tk.
O'Reilly has grown as a publishing company; we're bigger than we used to be, and that means we publish more books. We actually published more books on UNIX and UNIX-derived topics in the past year than in the days when UNIX made up our entire list! (We used to publish 15-20 books a year, now it's up to 60-75, so even if we publish more UNIX books than ever before, they will be only a small part of our list.)
It's silly to take the fact that all our books are no longer about UNIX as a sign that we've "deserted the fold." I guarantee you that we've done more work in the past year to promote UNIX/Linux and other open source technologies than ever before in our history.
But let's get back to the specifics: given that David is not a UNIX guy or a programmer, and we need someone who is both to do a good job on the palmpilot UNIX tools, do we have any volunteers to supply some solid information on this topic for the second edition of the book? Also, even if you can't help, let us know how important these tools are to you.
Please send mail to me if you think you can help.
--Tim
