The death of the DRM-free model was a big concern to me, but a recent supplementary blog post from Laura Baldwin, linked-to in the article but not called out, seems to claim that O'Reilly books will still be available DRM-free from Google Books. It's not clear to me if this means the Google Play e-book store, or something else.
Blog post here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...