Tim O'Reilly, founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates, was a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet and has been an activist for Internet standards and open source software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key Internet technologies, most recently organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents. LWM editor-in-chief Kevin Bedell recently had the opportunity to speak with Tim about the history of O'Reilly & Associates, as well as the past and the future of open source.

LWM: Tim, a lot of people know O'Reilly & Associates for your technical books with the animals on the cover. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started the company?
Tim O'Reilly: I first started in the computer industry in 1978. I was partnered with another guy doing tech writing consulting. That was really the beginning of my career.

I have friend who is a programmer who was asked to write a manual. I was a writer who knew nothing about computers. I said, "Oh, I'll help you out." We applied for this contract job, we got it, and I helped him behind the scenes. We went from there and started applying for jobs together.

O'Reilly & Associates was formally incorporated in 1983. The publishing idea came to us in 1985. I was very interested in figuring out how to go from being a services company to being a product company.

One big breakthrough in our publishing was in 1992 when we published The Whole Internet User's & Guide Catalog, which was the first popular book about the Internet. The book went on to sell around a million copies and got selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the Twentieth Century. Among other things, in that book we did a chapter on the World Wide Web, even though there were only about 200 Web sites at that point.

In fact, it was through a piece of junk mail advertising that book that the people at NCSA [National Center for Supercomputing Applications] learned about the Web and started the Mosaic project.

I then hired Brian Erwin, who was the director of activism for the Sierra Club. Brian came in just at the point when we published The Whole Internet and he took to the Internet like a duck to water. He just got it, how powerful it was, and he figured out a lot of the things that people now take for granted in Internet marketing.

He leaned on me and he said, "Look, you don't want to market your products. You want to market the ideas behind your products." So that was when I really started the career that I think a lot of people know me for, really, a sort of activism.

This is an activism style of marketing, so I basically started preaching about the Internet. Up to that point, we would send out review copies to technical magazines and the like. Brian said, "No, the Internet is really important. Let's go try and get this in TIME Magazine." So we went to New York and started banging on the doors of the mainstream press and saying, "Hey look, it's the Internet. The Internet." We sent copies of the book to every member of Congress and just sort of really got people fired up about the Net.

The next big piece of activism that I did was around Perl and open source in 1997 and 1998. It was just the same kind of thing: "Hey, nobody is talking about this stuff. It's clearly really important to my customers, but nobody pays much attention."

LWM: Actually I wanted to talk a little bit about that. Eric Raymond has said that your Perl Conference was one of the first places he gave the talk that eventually became The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
O'Reilly: He actually first gave it at a Linux conference where he and I were both on the program. That was in March 1997. It was around that time that I started planning the Perl Conference, maybe a little before that.

I heard this talk and I invited Eric to come give it as his keynote at the Perl Conference. I think it was at that Perl Conference that some folks at Netscape heard it. They got bit by the bug and invited Eric to come talk to them about possibly open sourcing Netscape and Netscape Navigator, and things went from there.

The term "open source" was actually coined by Christine Peterson in a brainstorming meeting at VA Systems with Eric, Larry Augustin, and a couple of other people. It wasn't really widely adopted until a couple weeks later when I had what I originally called The Freeware Summit.

I invited about 20 people together, to really make a PR event. We also invited press; by then we'd built really good relations with Reuters and New York Times and the like. We planned the day with a press conference afterwards. The real story was, "This is really important technology that's off the radar! Pay attention!"

But at that meeting we ended up talking about one of the problems with the term "free software"; it didn't really make sense to a lot of people. I remember Linus saying, "I didn't realize that free means two things in English" - libre [implying freedom to change and view source code - ed.] and without cost. So we started discussing alternate names and Michael Tiemann said we could start to call it "Sourceware," and various other names were proposed.

One of them was Eric Raymond's suggestion of Christine's term open source, and we debated and voted in the end. We agreed that everyone would use this term because if we all started using it, it would catch on better, so it was at the press conference after that meeting that the term open source got its first big push. We had all the leaders of the movement sitting up on the podium saying, "We all do the same kind of thing and we call it open source."

A lot of it is really just a kind of activism around ideas. That's what I think of as a key part of what makes us different. We really do care about ideas. We care about shaping the future and birthing the future. That's kind of what we are still trying to do.

What we really want to do is figure out where the future wants to go and help it to get there.

LWM: You have a quote you often use, "The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed yet."
O'Reilly: Yes. That's William Gibson, a science fiction writer. It's a fabulous description, I think, of the key insight that drives our business. We see that there are people, who I kind of laughingly refer to as alpha-geeks, who are ahead of the curve; they figured out something that other people are also going to want to do.

People who are really good with their tools can do what they want. So that shows what people want.

LWM: What new ideas are you following right now that you think are still a little bit out there?
O'Reilly: There's a trend story that's happening. There's this great quote that I heard Ray Kurzweil give at a talk at the Foresight Institute: "I am an inventor and when you are an inventor, you have to look at long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started."

Let me give you an example. I gave a talk in which I was just sort of talking about this move to a new class of application using Amazon as a paradigmatic example.

I said, "Okay, so in this Internet era we have this functionality that's being delivered not by distributing software to your computer, but by somebody hosting a set of services. All right." I said, "This poses some real challenges for open source thinking because all of the open source licenses are conditioned on the act of distribution."

We have these amazing changes that are happening in the very framing of how our technology works, and we've got to catch up with it, and so I look at Web services and the challenge of Web services as incredibly important for open source.

That doesn't mean we have to have some open source version of Web services; it means we have to rethink in a profound way what open source means in the era of Web services.

Take Amazon for example again. If you had Amazon source code it might be nice, but it wouldn't give you Amazon.

I have been giving a lot of talks saying, "Okay, let's look at these examples, these Googles, these Amazons, and say, ‘What do they tell us?'" One thing I see in looking at Amazon is that they have created an architecture of participation that is completely independent of open source, or the fact that their software is not open source.

More people have actually contributed to Amazon than contribute to Linux.

They created this thing where all their customers help them build their interface. They write lists, they add reviews. This is why Amazon is better than a competing site like Barnes & Noble.com - they have the same products and they have a similar interface, except for all the user-contributed data.

I have this trick I do at my talks. I ask people in the audience "How many of you use Linux?" Depending on the audience I might get 80% of the people or 20% of the people. Then I say, "How many of you use Google?" Then I get 100% of the people. So I say, "Okay, what you just told me is that you think what you use is the computer in front of you. In fact what you use is the whole network, and some of these applications are running across the network."

LWM: It strikes me that the presidential campaign of Howard Dean is pretty much a model of what you are describing.
O'Reilly: Absolutely. You look at something like DeanSpace and it's really a question of managing bottom-up collaboration by a bunch of decentralized volunteers. MeetUp [www.meetup.com - ed.] is the same thing.

Again, it's not open source by licensing, but it's tapping into some of the same deep trends that open source was an example of. So, I think that the kind of lesson I would take from any of this is - when you see what's working, try to look through it to see the deep trend that's making it possible, that's shaping it.

The whole Dean thing is an example, and we are going to see it crop up in surprising places where people will figure out how to leverage the power of networks.

LWM: Were you surprised that the animals on your covers became so popular?
O'Reilly: Well, yes, of course I was surprised. But it also took a long time. Like a lot of things, we can look back on it and say, "Oh, this was totally the right decision."

In open source context my favorite bit about the animals is the fact that they were an open source contribution to O'Reilly. We didn't come up with them. Our first books had these little brown paper covers, with an illustration of a chestnut on them.

We hired a graphic designer; the graphic designer came in with something typically geometric and high-tech for computer books. I just looked at it and said, "That's just not us. It's not right. We better go back to the drawing board."

This was on a Friday afternoon. We were a small company, 10 people or so, and we had this company meeting to review these covers. One of our writers went home and happened to talk to her housemate about the problem; the housemate was a designer for Digital Equipment Corporation and thought all the Unix program names sound like weird animals. So she had this brilliant idea and she did some mock-ups over the weekend and sent them in with her friend. Monday morning we looked at them and went, "Wow, those are weird!"

It was like the guy who's on the cover of the "vi" book [see www.oreilly.com/catalog/vi6/?CMP=IL7015 - ed.] with the big eyes. It was all the weird-looking animals, and we thought, "Wow, this is very strange." We put them on the wall and sat with them for about a week, and then we said, "Man, let's go for it!" At first people were a little weirded out, but I think that's a characteristic of a lot of great brands. A little bit of a barrier, but once people get over the barrier, they are really inside the cult.

Over the years it took off, so, yeah, they are such a great part of what we do. I think it reflects what we do in a more profound way. We are not afraid to be quirky and I think of other books that kind of characterize this, for example, Doc Searls' book, The Cluetrain Manifesto. We are a Cluetrain kind of company. We just do things that seem right. We have natural responses to things and so we are an example of this idea that Doc put out, "Markets are conversations."

We are fundamentally an open source company in the sense that we share our ideas. We are in constant conversation, we are taking things in, and we are reflecting it back. That, I think, is a lot of what is at the heart of what we are about. What's best about open source is having a vibrant source of real encounters with the people you are trying to serve.

LWM: One last question: What's your favorite animal?
O'Reilly: I would have to say it would be between the guy with the big eyes, the "vi" guy we call him, and the Perl camel. Perl [see www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/ - ed.] was actually Larry Wall's suggestion. People always ask for animals and our graphic designer, the woman who came up with the idea originally and who we eventually hired, doesn't usually give them what they want because she wants to have a good reason for using a particular animal.

Larry, I think, is the only person who ever came up with an easy style and a right-brain reason. He said, "I want a camel." Everybody was saying we had to do an oyster for Perl - the obvious - and Larry said, "Perl is ugly, but it can go long distances without water." And he got it.