Tim O'Reilly

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."

Related Topics:
Tim O'Reilly - 1954 - Cork - Ireland - O'Reilly Media - Free software - Open source

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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 dotcom boom.

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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 O'Reilly's flagship event.

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In 2001, Tim got in a major tiff with Amazon, leading a protest against Amazon's one-click patent, and specifically, Amazon's offensive use of that patent against rival B&N.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 B&N case was settled.)

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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 succesful initiatives that harness user contributions.

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Tim graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a B.A. cum laude in Classics.

Related Topics:
Harvard College - Classics

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Tim is on the boards of Macromedia and CollabNet.

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