Aaron Huslage

Every few months there are bloggers out there who seem to completely miss the point and see something of a power grab by our friends at O’Reilly Media. Daya Baran of Bay Area WebGuild penned the latest piece of incendiary nonsense. His post is a rant about how O’Reilly strongarmed WebGuild’s apparent sugardaddy Google into dropping their support for their upcoming event entitled “Web 2.0 Conference & Expo”.

He quotes an email from Google that explains the situation and why they cancelled their sponsorship, notably this sentence: “I asked you three times to change the name of this weeks event in order to maintain the relationship and since you did not budge we will no longer support Webguild.” This says it all to me. Google made a decision not to piss off a strong ally in O’Reilly. That’s it. Baran’s claims to the contrary are patently ridiculous.

Baran says “O’Reilly contacted these old-timers and asked them to demand that WebGuild change the name of our event and conference and to cease supporting WebGuild.” This is probably not the case. Even if it were, it was more than likely in deference to the work of WebGuild that it would have happened. Keeping things under the radar and avoiding the PR flack it got the last time they tried to enforce their intellectual property rights would be in their best interest, after all. Instead of suing WebGuild for using their trademark, they may have just decided to take control of things from the back-end and get the event cancelled. This course of action would not be ideal, but certainly more gentle than previously.

The big deal behind all of this is not O’Reilly’s “model which is based on withholding knowledge and gouging attendees, companies, and sponsors,” as Baran puts it. They are obligated by trademark law to enforce their trademarks. Trademarks become null and void as soon as they are ignored and try as they might, opponents of the “Web 2.0″ trademark will never stop O’Reilly from doing this. The company is a business and as such is required to do what’s in the best interest of its shareholders, not what’s in the best interest of the community at large. If O’Reilly’s intellectual property becomes worthless, that would be one of the worst things possible for the company and its shareholders.

One final note. Baran chose to get personal with my friend Tim O’Reilly. He said, “Presently, O’Reilly is promoting keynote speaker Saul Griffith calling him a “genius” and “a scientist and engineering polymath” without disclosing the fact that he is his son-in-law. When I met him, I cordially introduced myself, however, O’Reilly was a despicable individual. He is a dinosaur whose time has past.” This is completely useless and poor behavior. I wish that Baran would retract this statement and issue an apology. I understand that he is angry over the situation, but this action by Google, and possibly O’Reilly at some low-level, was most certainly not personally targeted against Daya Baran or any of the folks at WebGuild. O’Reilly is nothing if not a professionally run organization with very smart people who don’t deserve that kind of treatment.

“O’Reilly Hate” is nothing new to the company. Any company with a measure of success is bound to have similar issues, but this is getting ridiculous. They are a company and do what’s best for them. Sometimes that means being completely open and sometimes that means they have to make hard decisions. O’Reilly has been great at building community and they will continue to, but people shouldn’t take that as owning a piece of the company or even having a say in what they do.