Recent Interviews/Articles

OpenBusiness: An Interview with Tim O'Reilly -- April 2006. OpenBusiness spoke with Tim about the evolution of the web and Web 2.0. In this interview, Tim re-emphasizes the most important points of Web 2.0, talks about the evolutionary relationship between open and free, and shares his views on "bionic software."

Wired Profile: The Trend Spotter -- October 2005. Wired writer Steven Levy visited Tim at his home in Sebastopol and wrote this profile, expounding on the history of O'Reilly Media and the O'Reilly Radar.

What Is Web 2.0 -- September 2005. Born at a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, but there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means. Some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom. I wrote this article in an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.

GAO Report: Tim O'Reilly's Letter to Congressman Wu -- September 2005. In March of 2004, Congressman David Wu of Oregon made a request to the General Accounting Office (GAO) for a report on the high cost of college textbooks. The GAO report was recently released, and confirmed the fact that the price of college textbooks has nearly tripled from 1986 to 2004. I wrote this letter to Congressman Wu referencing O'Reilly's solution: SafariU.

The O'Reilly Radar 2005 -- March 2005. The opening keynote for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference was delivered jointly with Rael Dornfest. It opens with Rael's "rules for remixing," segues into an abbreviated version of my "internet era business model design patterns" talk (which I also gave at Eclipsecon), and then finishes with some other things that are on our radar. The slides (PDF) are on the ETech presentations page. There's also a good summary of my comments on Alice Taylor's blog.

Get Your Hands Dirty! -- January 2005. Hackers of all stripes refuse to just take what they’re given. They’re driven to remake it, and getting there is more than half the fun. In the latest O'Reilly catalog, Tim writes about the host of new books and products within that celebrate the hacker impulse. We've got the information you need to hack, remix, and master technology at home and at work. So go on, get your hands dirty!

Read/Write Web Interview: Web 2.0 -- November 2004. In Part 1 of this Read/Write Web interview, I talk with Richard MacManus about the Web 2.0 Conference, the relationships between Apple and the web and Microsoft and the web, and data ownership and lock-in. In Part 2, we explore business models for web content, including discussion of RSS. And Part 3 focuses on eBooks, social networking, collaboration, and Remix culture.

Pick the Hat to Fit the Head -- October 2004. Larry Wall once said, “Information wants to be valuable,” and the form in which information is presented contributes to that value. At O'Reilly Media, we offer a variety of ways to get your technical information. Tim O'Reilly talks about it in his quarterly letter for the O'Reilly Catalog.

MacDirectory Interview: Tim Loves His G4! -- September 2004. I talked with Simon Hayes at MacDirectory.com about the success of the Mac platform, Apple's innovative support of digital media and networking (exemplifying David Stutz's "software above the level of a single device"), and what O'Reilly Media has in store for Mac users and administrators.

Technology and Tools of Change -- June 2004. Building the next generation of technology won't be easy, and will require developers, entrepreneurs, and the customers they serve to learn new skills. O'Reilly has a collection of new and favorite tools for building the future, including a new "Technology & Society" book series, a new "Web 2.0--Web as Platform" conference, and a new print-on-demand, custom books service called SafariU.

Open Source Paradigm Shift -- June 2004. This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus' annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations ranging from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User's Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat's internal "all-hands" meeting, and BEA's eWorld conference. I finally wrote it down as an article for an upcoming book on open source,"Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software," edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani and to be published by MIT Press in 2005.

State of the Computer Book Market -- February 2004. We've launched a new market research group at O'Reilly. Its mission is to develop quantifiable metrics for the state of technology adoption. Aided by Nielsen BookScan sales data, which shows us trends in what people are buying, we're able to evaluate trends in technology adoption that should help us do a better job of forecasting technology growth patterns. In this letter I wrote for O'Reilly's Spring 2004 Catalog, I share some of our analysis, something I expect to do more of in the coming year.

A FOSDEM Interview: Reinventing Open Source -- February 2004. I'll be speaking at FOSDEM this year on the subject of how next-generation applications are changing the rules of the computing game. In this interview, I talk about O'Reilly's book publishing program, past and present, and my goal to create the maximum value for users, developers, and everyone in the software ecosystem. Today that means coming to grips with the way the computer landscape is changing, giving up old open source battles from the 1980s and 1990s, and focusing on how we might reinvent open source in this age of the Internet. (Slides from my talk are now available in PDF: The Open Source Paradigm Shift [4.4MB].)

My fundamental premise is that the world we all grew up in--the world of both Microsoft and the Free Software Foundation--is fundamentally challenged by the Internet. The Internet (not Linux) is the greatest triumph to date of the open source approach, yet it has changed the rules of software deployment so fundamentally that many of the techniques embraced by the open source community as first principles don't necessarily give the desired results. We need to reinvent open source in the age of the Internet. My talk gives some suggestions for what we need to think about.

We're All Mac Users Now -- January 2004. Wired News talked to a bunch of folks (including me) for comments on the 20th anniversary of the Mac. Nice words from all of us about just how important the Mac has been to the computer industry.

Apple has been able to reinvent itself because it has what is, at bottom, an aesthetic vision, rather than one that is solely based on profit and loss. Like Shaw's proverbial "unreasonable man," they try to bend the world to their vision. And they articulate that vision consistently, and persistently.

The Future of Technology and Proprietary Software -- December 2003. In celebration of its 25th anniversary, InfoWorld did a feature on where technology has been and where it's headed: 25 Years of Technology. Tim O'Reilly answered some questions for that piece about the future of technology and proprietary software. Many of his comments were included in the article, but here they are in their entirety, as well.

Tim's Blog Posts

• O'Reilly Radar Posts

Archive of Interviews/Articles

Organized in reverse chronological order within each subject, with a brief extract from each piece so you can get the flavor without actually following each link.

• O'Reilly History, Business Model, and Values
• Editorial Philosophy
• Software and Business Method Patents
• P2P, Web Services, and the Emergent Internet Operating System
• Open Source Software
• Publishing Industry, EBooks, or the Practice of Publishing
• Reviews: Books that Have Shaped My Thinking
• Science Fiction
• Travel Writing
• Miscellaneous

Ask Tim

Why Is the Web the Way It Is Today? --  December 2005. In what direction could the internet have gone if it were not for the FSF/GNU movement and how would the internet have looked today? Tim O'Reilly offers his perspective.

Is Perl Still Relevant? --  July 2005. With the emergence of .NET, J2EE, Python, PHP, et. al, has Perl lost its niche as a scripting glue language? Tim O'Reilly comments.

When will Perl 6 ever get done? --  August 2004. It's difficult to make predictions about when Perl 6 will be released. For one thing, Perl is still and always under development; for another, there's no rush. perl.com editor Simon Cozens writes that if you have a pressing need for Perl 6, more developers are welcome.

RepKover Binding --  March 2004. O'Reilly has good--no, great news about RepKover lay-flat binding, the very durable and flexible binding method that allows the interior of a book to "float" free from its cover and lay flat open on your table.

Amazon and Open Source --  February 2004. Amazon realized early on that amazon.com was more than just a book site, more in fact than just an e-commerce site. It was beginning to become an e-commerce platform. Open source has been a key part of the Amazon story, and although Amazon has closed code, it has created its own "architecture of participation" that may be even richer than that of many open source software development communities.

Did Amazon Listen? --  December 2003. After all that controversy over Amazon's 1-Click patent, what's this about them receiving a patent for new features on their ordering forms? Tim explains that Jeff Bezos never said he'd stop filing for patents, but that he'd think twice before enforcing them in a potentially offensive way.

O'Reilly's E-Book Strategy --  November 2003. O'Reilly's e-book strategy is to build a flexible data repository supporting XML web services that will allow us to deliver content into a variety of channels. The O'Reilly Network, which offers online content in bite-size chunks, is the "smaller" part of the strategy; Safari, a database of thousands of books that you can search across, is the "bigger" part.

Are "how to" books archaic? --  November 2003. A reader asked us about O'Reilly's vision for future books given the rate of change in technology and the growth of the Internet as an information source. Tim says "how to" books will only become more important as the paradigm shift that's taking place in computing leads us into uncharted territory.

What happened to BountyQuest? --  October 2003. What ever happened to BountyQuest, the web site where people could post large rewards for documents proving prior art on a patent, thus proving a patented invention is not really new?

E-Books and P2P --  September 2003. Why doesn't O'Reilly offer stand-alone e-books? As an advocate for P2P, wouldn't it follow that Tim would make O'Reilly books available for download? Tim talks about P2P, copyright, the value of giving away content, e-books as a business model, and the potential of O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf.

More Ask Tim