Andy Oram

Editor

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 Security April 2009 Print: $39.99 Ebook: $31.99	Beautiful Code by Andy Oram , Greg Wilson June 2007 Print: $44.99 Ebook: $35.99 (4) (Read Reviews)
Peer-to-Peer 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 Print: $29.95 (4) (Read Reviews)	Programming with GNU Software by Andy Oram , Mike Loukides December 1996 Print: $39.95 (4) (Read Reviews)
Managing Projects with make by Andy Oram , Steve Talbott Second Edition October 1991 OUT OF PRINT (3) (Read Reviews)

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.

Blog

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NoSQL: Staying for the feature presentation

March 12 2010

I left the NoSQL Live conference in Boston with the impression that features rather than architecture drive the adoption of NoSQL projects. read more

echotracker as an aggregation tool for different user integrations

March 10 2010

A developer preview was just released of a new open source tool called echotracker that aims to collect interesting information about the people you communicate with and present it to you as you're reading your email. read more

Report from HIMMS Health IT conference: building or bypassing infrastructure

March 05 2010

lectronic record systems need all kinds of underlying support. Your patient doesn't want to hear, "You need an antibiotic right away, but we'll order it tomorrow when our IT guy comes in to reboot the system." Your accounts manager would be almost as upset if you told her that billing will be delayed for… read more

Report from HIMMS Health IT conference: toward interoperability and openness

March 04 2010

The U.S. has a mobile population, bringing their aches and pains to a plethora of institutions and small providers. That's why health care needs interoperability. Furthermore, despite superb medical research, we desperately need to share more information and crunch it in creative new ways. That's why health care needs openness. read more

Report from HIMMS Health IT conference: from Silicon Valley technology to Silicon Valley risk-taking

March 02 2010

Although many people have been saying that the medical field would benefit from a Silicon Valley approach to technology, it's coming to seem that even more important would be a Silicon Valley approach to risk-taking. Initial report from annual HIMSS conference. read more

NoSQL conference coming to Boston

February 24 2010

On March 11 Boston will host a conference on the movement broadly known as NoSQL. This blog looks at who uses these projects and discusses the role of open source communities. read more

Innovation Lessons in "Start-Up Nation"

February 15 2010

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle investigates the social, historical, and psychological traits that produce extraordinarily creative people--and significantly, creative people who can translate their cranial light-bulbs into technologies with the potential to change the world. read more

One hundred eighty degrees of freedom: signs of how open platforms are spreading

February 05 2010

Visualize open networks--and remember how far we've already come from the days before flat-rate long distance phone calls (much less app stores for cell phones). read more

Trademarks, trust, and software quality

January 29 2010

Trademark law hasn't caught up to free and open source software. But the issues it needs to address are parallel to quality and trust issues in the technology. read more

Innovation Battles Investment as FCC Road Show Returns to Cambridge

January 14 2010

Yesterday's FCC panel show that innovation and investment are not always companions on the Internet. An in-depth look at the current state of the debate over competition and network neutrality. read more

Wayner security flip gets real-life play in Wesabe's Grendel

January 13 2010

A security trick documented by Peter Wayner in the books Beautiful Security and Translucent Databases was also discovered and used by Wesabe. read more

Pew Research asks questions about the Internet in 2020

January 07 2010

Pew Research conducts a "future of the Internet" survey every few years in which they throw outrageously open-ended and provocative questions at a chosen collection of observers in the areas of technology and society. read more

The fate of WIPO, ACTA, and other intellectual property pushes in the international economy

January 06 2010

Intellectual property wars are fiercer than ever. But we may be in for a pendulum shift. read more

Being online: Conclusion--identity narratives

December 30 2009

Identity online is created by combining many discrete items into a coherent picture. This concluding section of the article suggests that Social networking gives individuals more control over the picture. read more

Being online: Group identities and social network identities

December 28 2009

Groups take on their own identities online, and social networks threaten to subsume individual identities into groups. This section of the identity article explores grouping in all its online facets. read more

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