Calling his meeting "the Freeware Summit," O'Reilly
says he wanted to direct media and community attention
to the other deserving projects that had also
encouraged Netscape to release Mozilla. "All these guys
had so much in common, and I was surprised they didn't
all know each other," says O'Reilly. "I also wanted to
let the world know just how great an impact the free
software culture had already made. People were missing
out on a large part of the free software tradition."
In putting together the invite list, however, O'Reilly
made a decision that would have long-term political
consequences. He decided to limit the list to
west-coast developers such as Wall, Eric Allman,
creator of sendmail, and Paul Vixie, creator of BIND.
There were exceptions, of course: Pennsylvania-resident
Raymond, who was already in town thanks to the Mozilla
launch, earned a quick invite. So did Virginia-resident
Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. "Frank Willison,
my editor in chief and champion of Python within the
company, invited him without first checking in with
me," O'Reilly recalls.
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