Tim O'Reilly

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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 supporter of the free software and open source movements. O'Reilly 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 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 in 1992 when there were only 200 web sites in Ed Krol's groundbreaking Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog (1992). O'Reilly Media and also created the first web portal (and the first internet site to do advertising).

In 1997, the 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. These events motivated to organize the first Perl Conference and later the freeware summit (later known as the Open Source Summit).

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. Amazon has continued to file many patents, and the Barnes & Noble case was settled. As of 2006, Amazon has not repeated the events by suing for patent infringement.

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 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 their 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 its name. Since then it was revealed that CMP Media had filed trademark applications in the United States, the European Union and elsewhere that cover the term Web 2.0 used in titles of conferences and other events. This caused a massive uproar in the blogosphere and resulted in an agreement between CMP and the Irish non-profit.

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