tim o'reilly

Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O'Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal "Open Source Paradigm Shift" and other articles.

In an engaging and informative recent TWiT podcast, O'Reilly revisits the theme. It doesn't break new ground (for O'Reilly), but does highlight, and render somewhat meaningless, the fissures currently running through the open-source community.

Host Randal Schwartz … Read more

When Louis XV sneered disdain for the fate of France after his reign ("Apres moi, le deluge"), he uttered a sentiment that finds absolutely no purchase within the open-source community. Whatever its problems, the open-source world cares passionately about its principles, processes, and prospects. Insouciance is in short supply within the open-source community.

For this reason, we're at a critical moment in the history of open source, the moment when we can firmly declare, "Open source has won."

No, it has not "won" in the sense that all software is released under an … Read more

Open source has proved to be phenomenally successful, and continues to grow. As open source grows beyond its roots in software infrastructure like operating systems and Web servers, however, it is finding that the types of community it attracts is increasingly corporate.

Even in the geeky application server layer, Marc Fleury notes that JBoss' "community meant users, partners, consultants," not the freedom-loving developers we often associate with open source. This is because our simplistic conception of community has likely always been wrong, as Michael Dehaan suggests.

Open source has long been more about users than developers for the … Read more

I was listening to MGMT's "Kids" today on iTunes, and by the end of the song I found that I had shelled out roughly $6 for a few more songs by Arcade Fire, Sonic Youth, Band of Horses, and MGMT.

All of those songs are available for $0.00 on LimeWire, which I have installed on my computer, but which I haven't used in at least a year. I haven't needed to. Everything I want to buy is a click away and, better yet, as happened Monday, Apple keeps helping me find more things to … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The floor of the exposition hall at this year's Web 2.0 Expo has been a little bit lethargic, to say the least. "It's a lot emptier than last year," said one representative from a social gaming company that had set up a booth. "I think the 'Web 2.0' thing has become a bit of a stigma."

Indeed, these days the term goes hand-in-hand with broken business models and overblown expectations, as much as it does with innovation. With the economy in shambles, attendance at the semiannual conference is down. The show … Read more

O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly makes a provocative claim relative to Amazon's successful e-book reader, the Kindle: embrace open e-book standards, or be run over by them.

It's a bold prediction, considering what Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone. It may also be wrong.

Indeed, though I'd like O'Reilly to be right on this, I think that the iPhone, which he uses to prove his point, actually demonstrates against it. O'Reilly writes:

(Apple) seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to … Read more

TechCrunch tells us Web 2.0, at least as a buzz word, is dead, with Google Trends data suggesting that 2008 saw the term drop consistently and then precipitously as a matter of search interest.

I'm sure this is right, but I'm just as sure that it doesn't matter.

Tim O'Reilly, who coined the term "Web 2.0," has a knack for spotting trends and then moving on once they become less interesting. For him, that usually means once the rest of us have caught on and once the technology or trend in question … Read more

Tim O'Reilly makes the most cogent argument I've yet seen on why we should believe in global warming and act accordingly, even if we don't fully buy into the hype: The downside to belief is quite small. The upside is quite big.

In other words, it's a near-perfect application of Pascal's Wager, as Tim points out:

In my talks, I've argued that climate change provides us with a modern version of Pascal's wager: if catastrophic global warming turns out not to happen, the steps we'd take to address it are still worthwhile. … Read more

I had to stifle a laugh (or was it a yawn?) when reading "So Open It's Closed" on Elias Bizannes's Liako.biz blog. Bizannes is a leader in the data portability movement, which movement seems to be undergoing all the growing pains that open source once had (and still does, I suppose).

Consider Bizannes' plea for true and well-defined openness in data portability standards:

It's time some boundaries were set on what is effectively the brand of open. It's also time the term is defined, because quite frankly, it's lost all meaning now. … Read more