“The legendary computer book publisher talks about software
patents, e-books and the O’Reilly philosophy”
“We’re not just about computers or computer books,” says Tim
O’Reilly, president and founder of O’Reilly & Associates.
“We’re really about solving information problems. Our core mission
is transferring information from people who have it to people who
need it.” It’s a philosophy that has helped O’Reilly expand his
company from a smallish tech writing consulting firm to one of the
most respected publishers in the computer book business.”
“Founded in 1978, the company published its first computer book
in 1985. “As a consulting company, you have downtime,” O’Reilly
recalls. “I figured we might as well do something useful while we
didn’t have paying work, so we started writing manuals for programs
we were using that didn’t have very good documentation.”
“Along the way, O’Reilly – the company and the man – became
well-known supporters of open source software, in which programmers
share the all-important software source code. Beyond publishing
books on Perl, Linux and other open source languages, in 1998,
O’Reilly founded the annual Open Source Convention.”