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 hisi 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.

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."

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 & Associates' 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

Your Money or Your MySQL -- By tim

Andy Oram recently sent around to the O'Reilly editors' list some thoughts on the recent acquisition of InnoDB, MySQL's enterprise component, by Oracle. They are a thought provoking read, even in the version below, which is sanitized of some insider gossip that Andy felt would be better not repeated off O'Reilly's lists. While I've long maintained that licenses are a red herring when it comes to understanding the true importance of open source, there are definitely business implications to the license chosen. As Andy speculates, Oracle's purchase may well be an attempt to use the same dual licensing strategy that MySQL has employed so successfully against them. Here's Andy:

Your Money or Your MySQL -- By tim Andy Oram recently sent around to the O'Reilly editors' list some thoughts on the recent acquisition of InnoDB, MySQL's enterprise component, by Oracle. They are a thought provoking read, even in the version below, which is sanitized of some insider gossip that Andy felt would be better not repeated off O'Reilly's lists. While I've long maintained that licenses are a red herring when it comes to understanding the true importance of open source, there are definitely business implications to the license chosen. As Andy speculates, Oracle's purchase may well be an attempt to use the same dual licensing strategy that MySQL has employed so successfully against them. Here's Andy:
 

[October 11, 2005]

Skype Phone from Linksys -- By tim On the O'Reilly editors' list, Brian Jepson writes: "I don't know what's more interesting... the phone itself, or that it's from Linksys, who's one of Vonage's major partners in the retail channel.
[October 11, 2005]

Using Half Life 2 in Academia -- By tim On the O'Reilly editors list, Brian Jepson pointed to a Microsoft Research podcast on using Half Life 2 for unexpected purposes. The talk description:
 

"Valve Software, makers of the wildly popular Half-Life series of video games, will present an overview of the Source engine used in the development of Half-Life 2 and explain how you can use this engine within your classroom experience to teach video game development concepts. The talk includes a brief history of the mod scene and how it grew during Half-Life's lifetime, a tour and explanation of the primary technical features and tools Valve developed for Half-Life, and an overview of academic licensing for Half-Life 2 and Visual C++."

There's some really cool stuff in here on using the Half-Life 2 Source engine to create simulations.

When someone asks (at 11:41) about visualization for life sciences, I love the answer "the difference between a gun and a gene is just the number of polygons and the intention." That belongs on a t-shirt.

Setting User Expectations on Price -- By tim Great comment from Michael Powell at the Web 2.0 Conference (paraphrase): 'My son says 99 cent songs on iTunes suck! He thinks music should be free. But his ringtone bill last month was $40! To me, a ringtone is just a bad sample of a song, but to him, it's worth $2.99. It's all about setting expectations."
 

Boy is he right. This is one of the big challenges of every economic transition -- figuring out how to set user expectations for pricing. (Incidentally, this has been one of our challenges with Safari. For our publishing business to survive, we have to set expectations for the price of an electronic book service that will support the costs of producing the content -- and thus our business. If we don't set reasonable expectations, we die. Some of the early eBook services sold publishers on the idea that this stuff was just ancillary revenue, and so they could price it really low, as gravy. But we thought that online access would one day be primary, and we'd have to live on the revenue that it provides. So we needed to set the pricing expectations much higher. And note that I said "reasonable" -- enough to create a willing buyer and a willing seller. If we try to charge too much, we die too.)

Makes me think of George Soros' comment about "reflexive knowledge" - that many of the most interesting things are neither true nor false, but become true or false depending on what people believe.
[October 06, 2005]

Sun and Google to cooperate on Google Office? -- By tim From Search Engine Journal (via Dave Farber's IP list):
 

Google and Sun Microsystems Planning Major Announcement : GoogleOffice? Sun Microsystems and Google are planning a major news conference on Tuesday, October 4th (today) at 10:30 a.m. PT/1:30 p.m. ET. The conference will be held by Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Chairman and CEO and Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman of the Executive Committee and CEO. Sun Microsystems announced that McNealy and Schmidt will be discussing a new collaborative effort between the two companies. Yes, that sound you just heard was Microsoft cringing at the thought of Google and Sun working together.
 

Various analysts and geek gossipers are predicting that the partnership will be centered around Sun's OpenOffice, an open source office suite with alternative versions of Excel, Word, Powerpoint and other MicrosoftOffice-esque type offerings and StarOffice, a Sun project related to OpenOffice. To further escalate the rumors, Joerg Heilig, the former Director of Engineering for StarOffice, is now a Google employee.

More Radar Posts >>
More O'Reilly Network Posts >>

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.

National Competitive Advantage via Open Source --  August 2003. Do countries that embrace open source as a part of government policy gain a competitive advantage over those that do not? It's certainly possible, since open source can lower the cost of computing and increase the rate of innovation. But Tim is wary of open source entering into legislation: "Governments should mandate outcomes, not means, and they shouldn't be picking winners and losers."

More Ask Tim >>