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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
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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. 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.
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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.
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Digital Rights
Management Is a Non-Starter. July 2003. In an interview with stage4, I
write:
I believe that the content industries will flourish online once they stop
fighting their users and start offering them what they want at a price they
think is fair. That's the way it works in every other field of commerce!
. . . And as the content industries are discovering, existing copyright
law is quite enough legal protection for them to put a stop to the most
serious of copyright infringers. This is much the same lesson learned by
software vendors. . . . I'm also quite clear that the question isn't whether
P2P networks will spell the end of media companies. The question is whether
the companies that succeed on the new medium will be upstarts or existing
players.
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Head First, Hacks, Online Publishing, Killer Apps. July 2003. In this
lunchtime chat with JavaRanch, we covered a lot of ground. I might summarize
the whole interview this way: You don't make a movie by pointing a camera at
a stage play.
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A Three-Part Interview with PC Pro. July 2003. O'Reilly &
Associates
is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. To mark the event--and coinciding
with Tim O'Reilly's visit to London--we put the important questions to him
regarding the battle between IBM and SCO, the fate of Linux, his involvement
in the world of open source, and his love of science fiction.
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Thoughts
on the Success of Google Hacks. July 2003. Google Hacks rocketed to
the top of
the bestseller charts as soon as it was published in February, and has stayed
there ever since. Obviously, the success of the book is more than anything a
testament to the success of Google itself. But it's also a sign of the times.
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Software Licenses Don't Work. July 2003. An InfoWorld interview. "EBay
will someday
buy Oracle, open source licenses don't work, and the software market is about
to change forever. These are three of the predictions that O'Reilly . . . had
to offer in an interview conducted the week before his company's annual
Open Source
Convention."
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O'Reilly in a
Nutshell. June 2003. This article is based on an interview with Apple Pro.
Joe Cellini writes: "The same intimate push and pull that characterizes
O'Reilly's editorial relationship with hackers informs his marketing efforts,
which by design come across more as activism than hucksterism. By seeding,
screeding and evangelizing ideas across his websites and conferences, O'Reilly
attracts devoted readers and turns up expert authors, substantial grist for his
publishing mill."
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The Open Source Paradigm Shift
(PowerPoint). June 2003.
Here are the slides for the talk I gave, with minor variations,
at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen, Microsoft in the U.K., the U.K. Unix
User Group, British Telecom, and the Linux Expo in Birmingham. A video of the
Reboot presentation is online at
www.reboot.dk/reboot6/video/
(48MB QuickTime). There's also a much shorter video (7 minutes, 20 seconds) of
me exploring the same concepts in an interview with David Berlind of ZDNet at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in
Portland, Oregon (July 10, 2003).
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Buy Where You Shop. May 2003. If you like shopping in bookstores, remember this: many independent booksellers are on the ropes. If you value the bookstore experience, my advice is this: buy where you shop. I buy lots of books online. I read about them on a blog or a mailing list, and buy with one click. But when I shop for books in bookstores, I buy them there, and so should you.
Archive
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.
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