tim.oreilly.com -- Various Thing I've Written: Tim O'Reilly's Archive

Various Things I've Written

Tim O'Reilly's Archive

I've started to have trouble tracking down my various, scattered writings and interviews on the Net myself, so I decided to create a page where I could find my own words when I wanted to refer to them. I figured some other people might want to look at this archive as well. If you're interested in even more than you find here, check out my Ask Tim archives or my Weblog. And here's the official bio, a short official bio, and a personal bio.

Latest Entries

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. I talk about these initiatives in the O'Reilly Summer 2004 Book Catalog.

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.

Right of First Refusal Clauses in Book Contracts. January 2004. One of our editors wrote to our internal editors list an impassioned email about right of first refusal clauses. I agree with him that RoFR clauses are pernicious, and I challenge publishers who use them to justify the practice, if they can. Meanwhile, my advice to publishers is, if you want to keep your authors, treat them well, and sell lots of copies of their books. Locking them up by contract is not the way to go.

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.

My Wired News Wishes for 2004. December 2003. Michelle Delio of Wired News asked a bunch of geeks what we wished for in 2004, and what we thought would really happen. My answers are on page 2 of the story. Unlike many of the people interviewed, I actually have hope that many of the things I wish for will happen, but a few of them are beyond the pale of probability (especially the one regarding software patents). Since Michelle had to edit my answers down, I decided to publish my complete, original comments in my weblog.

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. I did an email interview to contribute to that article. Many of my comments were included at the end of the InfoWorld article, but I thought I'd supply the complete original as well.

INTO: What Are You Into? November 2003. I don't know how old I am, but I do know I'm passionate about making jam. Macromedia produced a short video clip of me (requires Flash Player 7) on its "Into" web site. When you've launched "the experience," click on my head, the third mug from the left. "What I hope for the future of the web is that it becomes unnoticed. The ultimate success of any technology is for it to be transcended. And that is the essence of human progress, that things that were once cutting-edge become common place. And that's kinda cool."

The Economics of Writing on Computer Topics. November 2003. How important is timeliness in computer book publishing? Can niche books succeed? What about titles that are gimmicks? These questions were posted to the Studio B Discussion List. I say timing is about more than being first to market on a technology. It's about being first to market for a market. Here are some "in the trenches" stories of O'Reilly publishing.

Foo Camp. In October 2003, O'Reilly held Foo Camp, a fun, concentrated, and efficient way to find out about new, transformative technologies and connect with the people who have deep knowledge of them. Foo Camp was very exciting. Business 2.0 columnist John Battelle did a nice job of capturing the spirit and importance of the event. His column in the December issue of Business 2.0 is available as a PDF from Jeremy Zawodny's weblog. (It also got picked up by CNN: When geeks go camping, ideas hatch.) Battelle's headline reads, "What happens when 200 hackers and visionaries camp out in the hills of Northern California? If you have a stake in the future of business, you'll want to find out." The Foo Camp wiki outlines the weekend's events and attendees, and a number of O'Reilly Network weblogs convey some of the ideas we shared, and the energy and enthusiasm we experienced at Foo Camp: Rob Flickenger's Rendezfoo; Andy Oram's Camping out with 200 innovators at Foo camp and AMD 64-bit Opterons brought to O'Reilly Foo camp; and William Grosso's Foo Camp.

All Software Should Be Network Aware. October 2003. Apple's original Human Interface Guidelines laid out Apple's vision for a set of consistent approaches for GUI applications. Even though Windows ended up with a different set than the Mac, the idea was simple and profound: create a consistent set of user expectations for all applications and live up to them. Now that we're moving into the era of "software above the level of a single device" (Dave Stutz), we need something similar for network-aware applications, whether those applications live on a PC, a server farm, a cell phone or PDA, or somewhere in between. Here are some of the things that I'd like to see universally supported.