History

By Tim O'Reilly

O'Reilly Media was originally a technical writing consulting company named O'Reilly & Associates. In 1984, we started retaining rights to manuals we created for Unix vendors. Our books were grounded in our hands-on experience with the technology, and we wrote them in a straightforward, conversational voice. We weren't afraid to say in print that a vendor's technology didn't work as advertised. While our publishing program has expanded to include everything from digital photography to desktop applications to software engineering, those early principles still guide our editorial approach.

We were early users of the internet. After the publication of our first million- copy bestseller, Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog, we developed our first online product, a version of the internet catalog from the book. That product, the Global Network NavigatorTM (GNN), was the first web portal. In addition to being the first exclusively web-based publication, GNN pioneered the advertiser-supported model of online publishing. We sold GNN to America Online in June 1995.

Today, our online offerings present technology information in a range of formats. Our portal for developers, the O'Reilly Network (www.oreillynet.com), focuses on open and emerging technologies, covering important new technologies in the trademark O'Reilly style-- independent and in-depth--and steeped in the experience of those on the "bleeding edge." Our O'Reilly Radar blog (radar.oreilly.com), written by a team of O'Reilly technologists, presents intelligence about emerging technology and highlights the original research conducted by the O'Reilly Research group.

When we set out to get our books online, we exploded the notion of "book," and built a web service that truly harnessed the power of the web to bring users exactly the information they need. Our Safari Books Online is a web-based subscription service that offers a searchable reference library of computer books from O'Reilly, Addison Wesley, Microsoft Press, and other leading publishers, at safari.oreilly.com. Safari Books Online is a joint venture with the Pearson Technology Group.

From the beginning, our editors, authors, and developers have been active members of the technical communities whose work we chronicle in our books and websites. Over the years, we've extended our support of those communities beyond our publishing program through activism and conferences.

In April 1998, we hosted a meeting that became known as the Open Source Summit. This event brought together leaders of many of the significant open source communities, including Linux, Apache, Perl, Python, and Mozilla, who voted to adopt the newly coined term "Open Source" to address ambiguities in the term "Free Software." The Summit garnered national publicity for open source, bringing it to the attention of the business world. In the years since, we've held summits on peer-to- peer technology, web services, geek volunteerism, and Ajax. The summits we've hosted have forged new ties between industry leaders, raised awareness of technology issues we think are interesting and important, and crystallized the critical issues around emerging technologies.

As part of our campaign to support the Perl community, we produced the first- ever conference on "the duct tape of the internet" in 1997. A few years later, we added conferences on several other important open source technologies, and the Open Source Convention (OSCON) was born. We realized that the people who read our books also want to connect with and learn from each other, so we moved full bore into the conference business. As with our publishing program, our conferences focus on practical, in-depth information taught by those who've mastered (and in many cases, created) important technologies. In addition to OSCON, our current conference offerings include the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech), Web 2.0 (produced in partnership with MediaLive and John Battelle), Where 2.0, EuroOSCON, and the MySQL Users Conference (with MySQL AB).

When we develop information products and services, we look for the right vehicle for the particular information we're covering. In February 2005, we launched Make, the first magazine devoted to do-it-yourself technology projects. An instant hit, it tapped into users' desire to tweak, hack, and customize their technology.

At the core, we create products that we want to use. Whatever form it takes-- book, conference, online product--we want anything produced with the O'Reilly name to be useful, interesting, and truthful. And we believe that there are plenty of intelligent, discriminating people in the world who value those qualities as deeply as we do.

[Tim's Bio]