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Tim O'Reilly

Abstract

Tim O’Reilly, a Harvard classicist who fell into technical writing, built the publishing house whose animal-cover books taught two generations of programmers Unix, Perl, and the web. His influence runs less through code than through language: his 1998 summit helped the industry settle on the name “open source”, his 2004 conference and 2005 essay gave the post-crash web its brand, “Web 2.0”, and his slogans (“government as a platform”, “create more value than you capture”) became policy vocabulary. He also built the web’s first commercial site, GNN, which carried the first clickable ad in 1994 and was sold to AOL a year before the boom it foreshadowed.

Tim OReilly
Tim O’Reilly, 2017. Image: Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Classicist in Unix Country

Tim O’Reilly was born on June 6, 1954, in Cork, Ireland, and grew up in San Francisco from infancy, one of seven children in an Irish Catholic family. At Harvard he studied classics, graduating cum laude in 1975 with no computing background at all. He drifted into technical writing in 1977, and in 1978 founded O’Reilly & Associates as a consulting shop for technical documentation. The pivot came through Unix: from 1984 the firm retained rights to manuals it wrote for Unix vendors and began selling them directly as the plain, practical Nutshell Handbooks. By 1988 publishing had overtaken consulting; in 1989 the company moved to Sebastopol, north of San Francisco.

The covers became the industry’s most recognizable brand by accident. Designer Edie Freedman, hearing Unix program names for the first time, thought they sounded like weird animals, and put nineteenth-century zoological engravings on the covers. The tarsier, the camel (Perl), and the rest turned a reference shelf into a menagerie; “the animal book” became generic shorthand for the definitive text on a technology.

Publishing the Internet

In 1992 O’Reilly published Ed Krol’s The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog, the first mainstream book about the internet and a bestseller that introduced the web to a public that had never seen a URL. To put the book’s catalog online, the company launched the Global Network Navigator (GNN) in August 1993: the first commercial web publication, a portal with news, a magazine, and a directory, designed end to end by one person, art director Jennifer Robbins. By early 1994 GNN carried sponsor links from a San Francisco law firm, the web’s first clickable advertising. AOL bought GNN in June 1995 for $11 million in stock and cash.

The company kept finding formats before they had names: technology conferences from 1997 (the business closed in March 2020, a casualty of the pandemic); Safari Books Online (2001, with Pearson), a subscription library of technical books that outgrew print and became O’Reilly Online Learning in 2018; the invitation-only Foo Camp unconferences at the Sebastopol campus, whose participant-driven format spawned the worldwide BarCamp movement; and Make magazine and the Maker Faires, which grew from an O’Reilly editor’s hobby beat into a subculture with its own economy.

Naming Things

O’Reilly’s distinctive work has been supplying the industry with words. In April 1998 he convened the Freeware Summit, bringing the leaders of the major free software projects to one table shortly after Netscape freed its browser code; the group publicly adopted “open source”, the term Christine Peterson had coined that February, and O’Reilly’s convening power helped make the rebrand stick (the naming schism it opened with Richard Stallman is told in The Open Source Movement).

“Web 2.0” followed the same pattern. Darcy DiNucci had coined the phrase in 1999; it became an era’s name when O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty picked it up in a 2004 conference brainstorm, built the Web 2.0 Conference around it, and O’Reilly’s September 2005 essay “What Is Web 2.0” gave the post-crash survivors a theory of themselves: the web as platform, data as the new Intel Inside, users as co-developers, harnessing collective intelligence. The essay’s vocabulary organized a decade of startup pitches (The JavaScript Revolution and The Social Media Revolution cover the technology and the companies). “Government as a platform” (2009) did the same for civic technology, seeding the Gov 2.0 movement in which his wife Jennifer Pahlka’s Code for America became the flagship. His business aphorism, “create more value than you capture”, and his 2017 book WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, an argument that platform economics is a choice rather than a law of nature, extended the pattern: O’Reilly as the industry’s editor, deciding which ideas get a memorable name.

The sharpest criticism takes aim at exactly that. Evgeny Morozov’s 2013 essay “The Meme Hustler” cast O’Reilly as a public-relations genius whose language did political work while claiming to be neutral description: “open source” replaced free software’s ethics with engineering pragmatism, “Web 2.0” dressed a conference brand as an era of history. O’Reilly’s defenders answer that supplying a shared vocabulary is how loose technical movements become able to act at all. Both sides agree on the underlying fact: the words won.

Dead End: GNN

O’Reilly owned the web’s first commercial portal and sold it twelve months before the industry realized what portals were worth. GNN under AOL was consolidated and shut down in December 1996; Yahoo, one year younger than GNN, was worth billions by 1998. O’Reilly has called the sale rational for a bootstrapped publisher that could not fund a land grab against venture capital, and the proceeds funded the conference and online-learning businesses that lasted. The counterfactual (O’Reilly Media as the web’s front page) stays a what-if of the early web, and GNN’s actual legacies are structural: the clickable ad and the portal format itself, both invented to sell books about the internet.

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