Tim O'Reilly
- For the musician, see Tim O'Reilly (musician).
Tim O'Reilly (born 1954, Cork, Ireland) is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) and a booster of the free software and open source movements. Tim defines his company not as a book or online publisher, or as a conference producer (though the company does all three), but as a technology transfer company, "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators."
O'Reilly Media published the first book about the web, devoting a whole chapter to it in 1992 when there were only 200 web sites in Ed Krol's groundbreaking Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog. O'Reilly Media also created the first web portal (and the first internet site to do advertising), the Global Network Navigator, or GNN, in 1993. GNN was sold to AOL in 1995 in one of the first big transactions of the dot com boom.
In 1997, after hearing that his company's book Programming Perl was one of the top 100 books in any category at Borders during all of 1996 despite a lack of mainstream computer industry recognition, O'Reilly launched a Perl Conference to raise the profile of Perl. He soon realized that many of his company's other software bestsellers were also on topics that were off the radar of the commercial software industry. So in 1998 he invited many of the leaders of these software projects to a meeting. Originally called the freeware summit, the meeting became known as the Open Source Summit because it was at this gathering that the group formally got behind a new term to tell their combined story. The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (which includes the Perl conference) is now one of O'Reilly's flagship events. Other key events include the Emerging Technology Conference and FOO Camp.
In 2001, Tim became involved in a major tiff with Amazon.com, leading a protest against Amazon's one-click patent, and specifically, Amazon's offensive use of that patent against rival barnesandnoble.com. The protest ended with Tim and Jeff Bezos visiting Washington D.C. to lobby for patent reform. (Since that time, Amazon has continued to file many patents, but has not repeated the offensive use of any patent. The Barnes & Noble case was settled.)
Tim's current passion is understanding just how open source is changing the computing landscape, leading to the commoditization of the software infrastructure (just as the PC commoditized the hardware infrastructure), and the creation of a new kind of value in what Tim has been calling Web 2.0, the internet as platform. He has coined the term architecture of participation to refer to the techniques and incentives that are common to successful initiatives that harness user contributions.
Tim was initially interested in literature upon graduating High School, but after graduating from Harvard College in 1975 with a B.A. cum laude in Classics he became involved in the field of computer manuals.
Tim is on the board of CollabNet, and was on the board of Macromedia until its 2005 merger with Adobe. He was also recently interviewed for Robert X. Cringely's vidcast NerdTV.
In May 2006, CMP Media, a company that helps O'Reilly Media sponsor the Web 2.0 conference, sent a cease and desist letter to a non-profit in Ireland which was organizing a conference that also had Web 2.0 in it's name. Since then it was revealed that O'Reilly/CMP Media had actually filed trademark applications in the United States, the European Union and elsewhere for the term Web 2.0 used in titles of conferences and other events. This caused a massive uproar in the blogosphere.[1]
See also
External links
- tim.oreilly.com Tim's home page and archive
- radar.oreilly.com The O'Reilly Radar - Tim's blog
- Tim's bio on oreilly.com
- Watching the Alpha Geeks Audio of Tim's 2002 talk at SDForum
- The Software Paradigm Shift Audio of Tim's 2003 interview with IT Conversations
- NerdTV Interview (video, audio, and transcript available) - 29 September 2005
- Wired report on Tim O'Reilly
- Tim's article The Open Source Paradigm Shift
- Tim's article What is Web 2.0?
- ^ Ivry, Sara (May 29, 2006). "Squabble Over Name Ruffles a Web Utopia". New York Times.