You are disparaging what is certianly the most popular publisher in the Free Software world, and which became that way by offering a consistantly solid line of books. Any call as extreme as a boycott should be backed up by a solid argument.

O'Reilly has made mistakes. Their clustering book was a disaster (I've heard rumors that the editor that approved it for publishing was fired for it). In all, though, they can be forgiven because of their use as an overwellmingly useful source of technical information.

I clicked on this node with the view twards giving the information presented a fair, objective opinion. However, the arguments you present do nothing to presuade me.

On "Hacking" books: if a bunch of script kiddies actually buy it, good. At this point, getting those kids to read any book is probably a good thing. In any case, I doubt the kiddies would spend money on such a book when free Internet resources will suffice for their purposes. They don't really want to learn about computers, just cause damage with them (no more, really, than the inner-city graffiti artist cares about the details of the paint they use). So this book is really more than they're looking for, and they don't want to waste time or money on information they don't want.

What it is useful for is security researchers and people who truely want to learn. Two sets of people, often overlapping, that should be encouraged in their endeavors.

On copyright problems: try finding a publisher (technical or not) that doesn't post-copyright some of their books. It's usually books published twards the end of the year, and the copyright date is given for the next year. This practice is so widespread in the industry that if you were to boycott every publisher that did it, you could hardly buy any books at all. Yes, it's illegal and a little deceiving, but is largely ignored.