Andy Oram

Biography

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, which is a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in free software and open source technologies. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, and the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer. His modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.

Andy is also a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and writes often for the O'Reilly Network and other publications. Topics include policy issues related to the Internet and trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. His web site is www.praxagora.com/andyo.

Andy works at the O'Reilly office in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lives nearby with his wife, two children, and a six-foot grand piano that can often be heard late at night.

Books

Beautiful Code
June 2007
$44.99 USD

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Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive T
by Nelson Minar, Marc Hedlund, Clay Shirky, Tim O'Reilly, Dan Bricklin, David Anderson, Jeremie Miller, Adam Langley, Gene Kan, Alan Brown, Marc Waldman, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Aviel Rubin, Roger Dingledine, Michael Freedman, David Molnar, Rael Dornfest, Dan Brickley, Theodore Hong, Richard Lethin, Jon Udell, Nimisha Asthagiri, Walter Tuvell, Brandon Wiley
February 2001
$29.95 USD

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Programming with GNU Software
by Andy Oram, Mike Loukides
December 1996
$39.95 USD

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Managing Projects with make
by Andy Oram, Steve Talbott
Second Edition October 1991
OUT OF PRINT

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Articles

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Printing Trends in Linux
Publish Date: Sep. 20, 2007Printing has been a notoriously difficult capability to configure in Linux, but work by the Open Printing Working Group is designed to change that. Andy Oram has been examining what we can expect in the future from this initiative, which includes distribution-independent drivers. Why Do People Write Free Documentation? Results of a Survey
Publish Date: Jun. 14, 2007Writing documentation is a thankless job when you're getting paid for it, so why in the world would people voluntarily do it for free? Andy Oram wondered just that, so he conducted a survey. Now he's here to present the results and some conclusions he's drawn. Rethinking Community Documentation
Publish Date: Jul. 6, 2006Good documentation makes good software great. Poor documentation makes great software less useful. What is good documentation, though, and how can communities produce it effectively? Andy Oram explores how free and open source software projects can share their knowledge with users and how publishers and editors fit into the future of documentation. The Long View of Identity
Publish Date: Jun. 29, 2006Who are you online? Your digital identity is a complex bundle of information--not just what you say about yourself, but what other people say about you and how trustworthy they are. O'Reilly editor Andy Oram recently attended the Identity Mashup conference at Harvard Law's Berkman Center and reports on one of the most vital issues of privacy and usability on the internet. The Problem with Webcasting
Publish Date: Jan. 13, 2006Andy Oram examines the new concept of a "webcaster's right" that major web portals are trying to introduce through a World Intellectual Property Organization treaty. The treaty would allow websites to control the dissemination of content they put up. Using the failed database protection laws as an example, Andy analyzes this new threat to the public domain. VoIP is all Business at VON
Publish Date: Dec. 13, 2005O'Reilly editor Andy Oram reports on the state of VoIP from this year's VON conference. As well as looking at some of the latest products and trends, Andy considers the security and policy issues facing the industry. Autumn Symposium Rakes Over Copyright and Patent Law
Publish Date: Nov. 10, 2005Andy Oram looks at the states of copyright, fair use, patent law, and more, as seen through the eyes of attendees at the recent Symposium on Intellectual Property, Creativity, and the Innovation Process. The conference attracted the likes of Marybeth Peters--register of copyrights, IP law critic James Boyle, open source advocate Chris DiBona, and EFF rep Cory Doctorow, to name a few of the people there who've planted stakes in the ground of this seeming turf war. Control Freaks: Modding and the Clash with Law
Publish Date: Oct. 28, 2005Modders, and the millions more who possess a natural creativity and an urge to get control over their lives, have, as Andy Oram puts it, "tumbled head-on into a legal snake pit." Their passion for changing things has become one of the fastest up-and-coming social trends in the U.S., and thus has drawn the litigious eye of large entertainment and media companies. Andy remains optimistic, however, that modders themselves can find ways to shift the focus away from modding as a legal issue, and toward a view of modding as a social and business issue. The Commons Doesn't Have a Business Plan
Publish Date: Jul. 28, 2005The commons used to be a grassy area in the center of town where anyone could graze animals. Now it's a metaphor for anything available to everyone without restriction. Andy Oram argues that this is the ground from which new businesses spring--and that open source and free software are the wellspring for new software and technology. make: The Evolution and Alternatives
Publish Date: Nov. 18, 2004After 13 years of the O'Reilly classic, Managing Projects with make, 2nd Edition, coauthor Andy Oram looks back and summarizes the evolution of make. With the recent release of Managing Projects with GNU make, 3rd Edition, author Robert Mecklenburg offers an adapted excerpt comparing Ant, IDEs, and make for managing the build process. A Firm Foundation for the Linux Desktop
Publish Date: Oct. 28, 2004Nearly every advance of Linux, open source, and free software on the desktop owes a debt to the X Window System. Too often, this debt goes unacknowledged. With the birth of X.org earlier this year, a foundational but once-stagnant project prepares to improve itself and its code to help free desktops everywhere. Andy Oram reports. The State of VoIP
Publish Date: Oct. 22, 2004Fresh back from the Fall 2004 Conference and Expo of the Voice on the Net (VON) Coalition, Andy Oram reports on the state of VoIP: what are its implications, where is it headed, and a detailed look at the many regulations that may help shape its future. Splitting Books Open: Trends in Traditional and Online Technical Documentation
Publish Date: Sep. 23, 2004While technical publishers strive to adapt to new online media and formats, online efforts at self-education by computer users are becoming a form of true grassroots documentation. O'Reilly editor Andy Oram discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each side--traditional books and user self-education--and suggests how they may converge. He also offers suggestions for improving the educational effects of mailing lists, computing project web sites, and other community-based documentation. Symbiot on the Rules of Engagement
Publish Date: Mar. 10, 2004Andy Oram talks to the chief officers of Symbiot Security about their controversial white paper, "The Rules of Engagement". Why Human Rights Requires Free Software
Publish Date: Oct. 11, 2002Human rights workers should be universally feted and supported. Instead, however, they are chronically underfunded, goaded to justify every detail of their work, and threatened with dire harm. For these reasons, human rights work requires free software.

Multimedia

Webinar: Control a World of Computers From Your Linux PC
March 20, 2008
In this webinar, Carla Schroder, columnist, blogger, and author of the Linux Cookbook and Linux Networking Cookbook, covers the finer points of secure remote graphical administration from your Linux PC, showing how to run graphical applications, your...

Blog

Google Friend Connect and limits to sharing

May 14 2008

We're all tired of acquaintances tugging on us to sign up for new social networks. But we wouldn't want to have just one big social network, either. Google's Friend Connect, which was announced on Monday and covered by Radar as well as other sites, represents a small step toward a middle ground. Complete information sharing would mean mingling… read more

Why open source developers can be more productive, and other tales from a Google open house

May 14 2008

Google likes hiring programmers who contribute to open source projects because they're more self-motivated. On open source projects, volunteers may be assigned tasks, but often they recognize a need and propose to fill it. This and many other interesting topics came up at the party celebrating the opening of Google's larger Cambridge, Massachusetts office. read more

Maker Faire mimesis and open speculation

May 03 2008

Maker Faire is a string-and-duct-tape combination of O'Reilly's, Emerging Technology, Open Source, and Money:Tech conferences. The ultimate impact, like the free software movement, is to enhance everyone's mastery of their environments and both the tools and the confidence for solve one's own problems. This process--which reflects the way most of the great scientists became their mature… read more

Consider the economics in network neutrality

April 22 2008

Four days ago, the FCC held a widely publicized hearing at Stanford about bandwidth regulation on the Internet. In my summary analysis and background explanation of an earlier hearing at Harvard, I referred to the highly unpopular Brett Glass, whose experience running a rural wireless ISP radiates a different perspective from all other commentators. Glass got to speak at… read more

Book review: "The Future of the Internet (And How to Stop It)"

April 16 2008

You can read Jonathan Zittrain's book for cogent discussions of key issues in copyright, filtering, licensing, censorship, and other pressing issues in computing and networking. But you're rewarded even more if you read this book to grasp fundamental questions of law and society "The Future of the Internet" offers valuable summaries of current debates, but… read more

MySQL is not simple

April 15 2008

A conference attendance that tops 2000 suggests that a technology involves a certain number of subtle angles. MySQL became a hit because installing it and manipulating tables were so simple--and yet when you get serious, the simple things start growing hair. The attendees I've talked to at this conference have their hands greasy every… read more

Book review: "The Future of the Internet (And How to Stop It)"

April 14 2008

Can a program lie to you the way a story or essay can?

April 06 2008

I just finished an unusual conference called Codework at the University of West Virginia, where computer science experts and writers batted around the similarities among their disciplines and the differences between writing code and writing fiction. Ruby inventor Yukihiro Matsumoto gave us a chapter for Beautiful Code in which he compares programming to essay-writing, with many positive… read more

An evening with Ted Nelson: visionary prerequisites for a vision

April 04 2008

Readers have plenty of ways to learn about Nelson's famous Xanadu and his more recent project Zigzag, one of the best ways being to hear him speak as we did in a full hall last night. To me, the fundamental and most breath-taking aspect of Xanadu is not the linking and sharing of information, but its… read more

Personal responsibility for Internet safety: What O'Reilly is doing

April 01 2008

O'Reilly is soon to release its first graphic novel, Hackerteen\, a book teaching young people basic Internet technology and a deeper understanding of where and why Internet use can be risky. If people start out indifferent about security, or unconfident that they can do something about it, fear can actually decrease protective actions. Moreover, education can fall on… read more

To be free, information has to be smart (comments on Chris Anderson's "Free!")

March 24 2008

WIRED Magazine's editor in chief Chris Anderson, following up on the popularity of his Long Tail meme, theorizes in the March 2008 issue of WIRED about the modern tendency to put information online at no cost. I think this is highly volatile and that the phenomenon will be driven in very different ways from his six… read more

Beautiful Code wins JOLT award

March 19 2008

Beautiful Code won Dr. Dobbs Journal's JOLT award as the best general book of the year in computing at SD West earlier this month. JOLT awards are some of the most prestigious in the field of software engineering. Details in our publicist's blog. read more

Companies crunch public stats for services to developers and administrators

March 18 2008

Companies are constantly opening new veins of ore as they attempt to mine the Internet for useful information. A service from SourceLabs recalls efforts by Splunk and Black Duck Software. Services such as these should lead to change in the tools used by developers and users to submit bug reports. The more data users provide, and the more that… read more

SD West 2008 wrap-up

March 08 2008

If observation is the first stage of scientific discovery, watching what people are doing in a field will tell you what the academics and theorists will write about in a few years. By this reasoning, SD West and SD Best Practices are important bellwethers for programming theory, even though there's little theoretical about… read more

iPhone toolkits: complementary development and O'Reilly coverage

March 07 2008

The Apple SDK bears a considerable resemblance to the open source SDK, but naturally has some differences. It's quite possible Apple will undo some of the changes and bring their toolkit closer to the open one. Regardless of which SDK you plan on using, you will find Jonathan Zdziarski 's iPhone Open Application Development valuable, in… read more

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