Tim O/'reilly In A Nutshell
Tim O’Reilly
in a Nutshell
Tim O’Reilly
in a Nutshell
Bejing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Paris • Sebastopol • Taipei • Tokyo
©2004 O’Reilly Media, Inc. O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of
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respective owners.
Contents
Introduction
Part I.
On Technology
The New Era of Pervasive Computing
12
All Software Should Be Network Aware
14
The Open Source Paradigm Shift
17
Watching the “Alpha Geeks”:
OS X and the Next Big Thing
46
Hardware, Software, and Infoware
55
Part II.
On Publishing
Piracy is Progressive Taxation
and Six Other Lessons on the Evolution of Online Distribution
68
Information Wants to be Valuable
81
Beyond the Book
86
Buy Where You Shop
93
v
Part III. On Business and Life
Rules of Thumb
98
Fishing with Strawberries
101
Some Necessary Qualities
103
Ten Years as a Publisher
106
Knowing When to Let Go
110
Walking the Kerry Way
113
Books That Have Shaped My Thinking
119
vi | Contents
Tim O’Reilly
in a Nutshell
Introduction
A preacher. That’s what the high school aptitude test told Tim
O’Reilly he should be. Possessed of a yearning to understand,
a passion for doing the right thing, the desire to spread the
good word, and the skill to persuade, Tim was a prime candi-
date for the ministry. As it happens, he ended up preaching the
gospel of technology.
Tim is also, fundamentally, a writer. In the twenty-five years
he’s spent immersed in the computer technology world, Tim
has often turned to writing as a tool to understand, and to
share what he discovers. Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell is a collec-
tion of Tim’s most thought-provoking pieces about technolo-
gy, the publishing business, and life (arranged by theme rather
than date). For more of Tim’s writing, see tim.oreilly.com.
9
On
Technology
The New Era of
Pervasive Computing
May 2003
This could have been easily dismissed as reckless optimism when
I published it on tim.oreilly.com. Just over a year later, the signs
of renewed, sustainable technology growth are starting to man-
ifest. The future’s never certain, but my optimism is firmly intact.
We’re now ten years into a massive technology-driven trans-
formation of the social, political, and economic landscape.
After the dot-com bubble and subsequent meltdown, we
think we’ve seen it all. But in fact, as Carlota Perez tells us in
her classic book, Technological Revolutions and Financial
Capital, every major technological revolution for the past
three hundred years has been accompanied by a financial
bubble. It is typically only after the bubble is over that the
long-term impacts of the technological change begin to be
felt. A radical new technology is deployed in a wave of irra-
tional exuberance. After the inevitable bust, the infrastructure
that was created during the bubble becomes the basis for a
long period of steady growth as the technology is really put to
use. Short-term thinkers flee the market just when things are
getting interesting, leaving the gains to be reaped by those
with their eye on the long view.
So with that long view in mind, here are some of the reasons
why I’m still bullish on our industry.
12
JavaTM and open source technologies like Linux®, Apache,
MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) are just hitting their
stride and will become even more important over the next
decade. Years ago, I urged Linux developers not to focus on dis-
placing Microsoft, but on becoming the “Intel Inside” of the
next generation of computer applications. And we’re well
along the path to that vision. Along with Java-based platforms
like BEA WebLogic® and IBM’s WebSphere®, LAMP-based
applications are at the heart of today’s “killer applications”—
Google,Amazon,Yahoo!, and a host of other familiar web titans.
On the enterprise side, a web services infrastructure is tying
businesses together with applications built on what is gradually
shaping up to be a next-generation “Internet operating system.”
Meanwhile, Microsoft is not to be counted out. Despite their
recent backpedaling on .NET marketing, Microsoft’s eyes are
clearly focused on the future, and a tactical retreat on over-
heated marketing does not mean that they are quitting
the game—only that they are about to try rewriting the rules
once again.
At the same time, Mac OS® X, Steve Jobs’ vision of the digital
hub, and new handheld devices are all radically changing con-
sumer expectations.
The era of the personal computer is over. We are entering the
pervasive computing era, where dozens or hundreds of spe-
cialized access devices suck services from the emergent global
network computer. At O’Reilly, we’re working hard to prepare
you for that future, as you take the tools we teach you about
and use them to invent it, in a virtuous circle.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 13
All Software Should Be
Network Aware
October 2003
Sun’s prescient marketing slogan, “The Network is the
Computer,” is becoming a fact of life. In this piece, written for our
Fall 2003 catalog, I posit that we need to re-think what software
is, where it lives, and how it works for users.
I’ve been noodling for some time on the idea that we need
some kind of equivalent to the old Apple Human Interface
Guidelines for the new world of networked applications. The
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” (to borrow Dave Stutz’s phrase), 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 sup-
ported:
1. Rendezvous-like functionality for automatic discovery
of and potential synchronization with other instances of
the application on other computers. Apple is showing
14
the power of this idea with iChat® and iTunes®, but it
could be applied in so many other places. For example, if
every PIM supported this functionality, we could have
the equivalent of “phonester” where you could automat-
ically ask peers for contact information. Of course, that
leads to guideline 2.
2. If you assume ad-hoc networking, you have to automati-
cally define levels of access. I’ve always thought that the
old Unix UGO (User, Group, Other) three-level permis-
sion system was simple and elegant, and if you replace
the somewhat arbitrary “group” with “on my buddy list,”
you get something quite powerful. Which leads me to . . .
3. Buddy lists ought to be supported as a standard feature
of all apps, and in a consistent way. What’s more, our
address books really ought to make it easy to indicate
who is in a “buddy list” and support numerous overlap-
ping lists for different purposes.
4. Every application ought to expose some version of its
data as an XML web services feed via some well-defined
and standard access mechanism. One of the really big
wins that fueled the early Web was a simple naming
scheme: you could go to a site called www.foo.com, and
you’d find a web server there. This made web addresses
eminently guessable. We missed the opportunity for
xml.foo.com to mean “this is where you get the data feed,”
but it’s probably still possible to come up with a simple,
consistent naming scheme. And of course, if we can do it
for web sites, we also need to think about how to do it for
local applications, since . . .
5. We ought to be able to have the expectation that all
applications, whether local or remote, will be set up for
two-way interactions. That is, they can be either a source
or sink of online data. So, for example, the natural com-
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 15
plement to Amazon’s web services data feeds is data
input (for example, the ability to comment on a book on
your local blog, and syndicate the review via RSS to
Amazon’s detail page for the book). And that leads to:
6. If data is coming from multiple sources, we really need to
understand who owns what, and come up with mecha-
nisms that protect the legitimate rights of individuals
and businesses to their own data, while creating the “liq-
uidity” and free movement of data that will fuel the next
great revolution in computer functionality.
7. We need easy gateways between different application
domains. I was recently in Finland at a Nokia retreat, and
we used camera-enabled cell phones to create a mobile
photoblog. That was great. But even more exciting was
the ease with which I could send a photo from the phone
not just to another phone but also to an email address.
This is the functionality that enabled the blog gateway,
but it also made it trivial to send photos home to my fam-
ily and friends. Similarly, I often blog things that I hear
on mailing lists, and read many web sites via screen-
scraping to email. It would be nice to have cross-applica-
tion gateways be a routine part of software, rather than
hacked on after the fact.
As networked devices become ever more central to our lives
and work, I hope to see even more “network aware” function-
ality routinely incorporated into new applications and devices.
16 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
The Open Source
Paradigm Shift
May 2004
This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-
Pincus’ annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since
then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty
times, at locations ranging from the O’Reilly Open Source
Convention, the UK Unix User’s Group, Microsoft Research in
the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat’s internal “all-
hands” meeting, and BEA’s eWorld conference. I finally wrote it
down as an article for an upcoming book on open source,
Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, edited by J.
Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani; to be pub-
lished by MIT Press in 2005.
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published a groundbreaking book
entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he argued
that the progress of science is not gradual but (much as we
now think of biological evolution) a kind of punctuated equi-
librium, with moments of epochal change. When Copernicus
explained the movements of the planets by postulating that
they moved around the sun rather than the earth, or when
Darwin introduced his ideas about the origin of species, they
were doing more than just building on past discoveries, or
explaining new experimental data. A truly profound scientific
breakthrough, Kuhn notes, “is seldom or never just an incre-
ment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the
17
reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior
fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom com-
pleted by a single man and never overnight.”[1]
Kuhn referred to these revolutionary processes in science as
“paradigm shifts,” a term that has now entered the language to
describe any profound change in our frame of reference.
Paradigm shifts occur from time to time in business as well as
in science. And as with scientific revolutions, they are often
hard fought, and the ideas underlying them not widely accept-
ed until long after they were first introduced. What’s more,
they often have implications that go far beyond the insights of
their creators.
One such paradigm shift occurred with the introduction of
the standardized architecture of the IBM personal computer in
1981. In a huge departure from previous industry practice, IBM
chose to build its computer from off-the-shelf components,
and to open up its design for cloning by other manufacturers.
As a result, the IBM personal computer architecture became
the standard, over time displacing not only other personal
computer designs, but over the next two decades, minicom-
puters and mainframes.
However, the executives at IBM failed to understand the full
consequences of their decision. At the time, IBM’s market
share in computers far exceeded Microsoft’s dominance of the
desktop operating system market today. Software was a small
part of the computer industry, a necessary part of an integrated
computer, often bundled rather than sold separately. What
independent software companies did exist were clearly satel-
lite to their chosen hardware platform. So when it came time
to provide an operating system for the new machine, IBM
decided to license it from a small company called Microsoft,
giving away the right to resell the software to the small part of
the market that IBM did not control. As cloned personal com-
puters were built by thousands of manufacturers large and
18 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
small, IBM lost its leadership in the new market. Software
became the new sun that the industry revolved around;
Microsoft, not IBM, became the most important company in
the computer industry.
But that’s not the only lesson from this story. In the initial com-
petition for leadership of the personal computer market, com-
panies vied to “enhance” the personal computer standard,
adding support for new peripherals, faster buses, and other
proprietary technical innovations. Their executives, trained in
the previous, hardware-dominated computer industry, acted
on the lessons of the old paradigm.
The most intransigent, such as Digital’s Ken Olson, derided
the PC as a toy, and refused to enter the market until too late.
But even pioneers like Compaq, whose initial success was
driven by the introduction of “luggable” computers, the ances-
tor of today’s laptop, were ultimately misled by old lessons that
no longer applied in the new paradigm. It took an outsider,
Michael Dell, who began his company selling mail order PCs
from a college dorm room, to realize that a standardized PC
was a commodity, and that marketplace advantage came not
from building a better PC, but from building one that was
good enough, lowering the cost of production by embracing
standards, and seeking advantage in areas such as marketing,
distribution, and logistics. In the end, it was Dell, not IBM or
Compaq, who became the largest PC hardware vendor.
Meanwhile, Intel, another company that made a bold bet on
the new commodity platform, abandoned its memory chip
business as indefensible and made a commitment to be the
more complex brains of the new design. The fact that most of
the PCs built today bear an “Intel Inside” logo reminds us of
the fact that even within a commodity architecture, there are
opportunities for proprietary advantage.
What does all this have to do with open source software, you
might ask?
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 19
My premise is that free and open source developers are in
much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it
changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to
understand the consequences of the change, allowing others to
reap the benefits. Most existing proprietary software vendors
are no better off, playing by the old rules while the new rules
are reshaping the industry around them.
I have a simple test that I use in my talks to see if my audience
of computer industry professionals is thinking with the old
paradigm or the new. “How many of you use Linux®?” I ask.
Depending on the venue, 20-80% of the audience might raise
its hands. “How many of you use Google?” Every hand in the
room goes up. And the light begins to dawn. Every one of them
uses Google’s massive complex of 100,000 Linux servers, but
they were blinded to the answer by a mindset in which “the
software you use” is defined as the software running on the
computer in front of you. Most of the “killer apps” of the
Internet, applications used by hundreds of millions of people,
run on Linux or FreeBSD. But the operating system, as for-
merly defined, is to these applications only a component of a
larger system. Their true platform is the Internet.
It is in studying these next-generation applications that we can
begin to understand the true long-term significance of the
open source paradigm shift.
If open source pioneers are to benefit from the revolution
we’ve unleashed, we must look through the foreground ele-
ments of the free and open source movements, and under-
stand more deeply both the causes and consequences of the
revolution.
Artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil once said, “I’m an
inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an
invention has to make sense in the world in which it is fin-
ished, not the world in which it is started.”[2]
20 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
I find it useful to see open source as an expression of three
deep, long-term trends:
• The commoditization of software
• Network-enabled collaboration
• Software customizability (software as a service)
Long-term trends like these “three Cs,” rather than the Free
Software Manifesto or The Open Source Definition, should be
the lens through which we understand the changes that are
being unleashed.
Software as Commodity
In his essay Some Implications of Software Commodification,
Dave Stutz writes:
The word commodity is used today to represent fodder for
industrial processes: things or substances that are found to
be valuable as basic building blocks for many different pur-
poses. Because of their very general value, they are typically
used in large quantities and in many different ways.
Commodities are always sourced by more than one pro-
ducer, and consumers may substitute one producer’s prod-
uct for another’s with impunity. Because commodities are
fungible in this way, they are defined by uniform quality
standards to which they must conform. These quality stan-
dards help to avoid adulteration, and also facilitate quick
and easy valuation, which in turn fosters productivity gains.
Software commoditization has been driven by standards, in
particular by the rise of communications-oriented systems
such as the Internet, which depend on shared protocols, and
define the interfaces and datatypes shared between cooperat-
ing components rather than the internals of those compo-
nents. Such systems necessarily consist of replaceable parts. A
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 21
web server such as Apache or Microsoft’s IIS, or browsers such
as Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator®, or Mozilla, are all
easily swappable, because in order to function, they must
implement the HTTP protocol and the HTML data format.
sendmail can be replaced by Exim or Postfix or Microsoft
Exchange because all must support email exchange protocols
such as SMTP, POP, and IMAP. Microsoft Outlook® can easily
be replaced by Eudora®, or Pine, or Mozilla Mail, or a web
mail client such as Yahoo! Mail for the same reason.
(In this regard, it’s worth noting that Unix®, the system on
which Linux® is based, also has a communications-centric
architecture. In The Unix Programming Environment, Kernighan
and Pike eloquently describe how Unix programs should be
written as small pieces designed to cooperate in “pipelines,”
reading and writing ASCII files rather than proprietary data for-
mats. Eric Raymond gives a contemporary expression of this
theme in his book, The Art of Unix Programming.)
Note that in a communications-centric environment with
standard protocols, both proprietary and open source soft-
ware become commodities. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web
browser is just as much a commodity as the open source
Apache web server, because both are constrained by the open
standards of the Web. (If Microsoft had managed to gain dom-
inant market share at both ends of the protocol pipeline
between web browser and server, it would be another matter!
See How the Web Was Almost Won at tim.oreilly.com for my
discussion of that subject. This example makes clear one of the
important roles that open source does play in “keeping stan-
dards honest.” This role is being recognized by organizations
like the W3C, which are increasingly reluctant to endorse
standards that have only proprietary or patent-encumbered
implementations.)
What’s more, even software that starts out proprietary eventu-
ally becomes standardized and ultimately commodified. Dave
22 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Stutz eloquently describes this process in an essay entitled The
Natural History of Software Platforms:
It occurs through a hardening of the external shell presented
by the platform over time. As a platform succeeds in the
marketplace, its APIs, UI, feature-set, file formats, and cus-
tomization interfaces ossify and become more and more
difficult to change. (They may, in fact, ossify so far as to
literally harden into hardware appliances!) The process of
ossification makes successful platforms easy targets for
cloners, and cloning is what spells the beginning of the end
for platform profit margins.
Consistent with this view, the cloning of Microsoft’s
Windows® and Office franchises has been a major objective of
the free and open source communities. In the past, Microsoft
has been successful at rebuffing cloning attempts by continu-
ally revising APIs and file formats, but the writing is on the
wall. Ubiquity drives standardization, and gratuitous innova-
tion in defense of monopoly is rejected by users.
What are some of the implications of software commoditiza-
tion? One might be tempted to see only the devaluation of
something that was once a locus of enormous value. Thus, Red
Hat® founder Bob Young once remarked, “My goal is to shrink
the size of the operating system market.” (Red Hat however
aimed to own a large part of that smaller market!) Defenders of
the status quo, such as Microsoft VP Jim Allchin, have made
statements such as “open source is an intellectual property
destroyer,” and paint a bleak picture in which a great industry
is destroyed, with nothing to take its place.
On the surface, Allchin appears to be right. Linux now gener-
ates tens of billions of dollars in server hardware related rev-
enue, with the software revenues merely a rounding error.
Despite Linux’s emerging dominance in the server market, Red
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 23
Hat, the largest Linux distribution company, has annual rev-
enues of only $126 million, versus Microsoft’s $32 billion. A
huge amount of software value appears to have vaporized.
But is it value or overhead? Open source advocates like to say
they’re not destroying actual value, but rather squeezing inef-
ficiencies out of the system. When competition drives down
prices, efficiency and average wealth levels go up. Firms unable
to adapt to the new price levels undergo what the economist
E.F. Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” but what was
“lost” returns manyfold as higher productivity and new
opportunities.
Microsoft benefited, along with consumers, from the last
round of “creative destruction” as PC hardware was commodi-
tized. This time around, Microsoft sees the commoditization
of operating systems, databases, web servers and browsers, and
related software as destructive to its core business. But that
destruction has created the opportunity for the killer applica-
tions of the Internet era. Yahoo!®, GoogleTM, Amazon®,
eBay®—to mention only a few—are the beneficiaries.
And so I prefer to take the view of Clayton Christensen, the
author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s
Solution. In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, he artic-
ulates “the law of conservation of attractive profits” as follows:
When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value
chain because a product becomes modular and commodi-
tized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with propri-
etary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.[3]
We see Christensen’s thesis clearly at work in the paradigm
shifts I’m discussing here.[4] Just as IBM’s commoditization of
the basic design of the personal computer led to opportunities
for attractive profits “up the stack” in software, new fortunes
are being made up the stack from the commodity open source
software that underlies the Internet, in a new class of propri-
etary applications that I have elsewhere referred to as “infoware.”
24 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Sites such as Google, Amazon, and salesforce.com provide the
most serious challenge to the traditional understanding of free
and open source software. Here are applications built on top
of Linux, but they are fiercely proprietary. What’s more, even
when using and modifying software distributed under the
most restrictive of free software licenses, the GPL, these sites
are not constrained by any of its provisions, all of which are
conditioned on the old paradigm. The GPL’s protections are
triggered by the act of software distribution, yet web-based
application vendors never distribute any software: it is simply
performed on the Internet’s global stage, delivered as a service
rather than as a packaged software application.
But even more importantly, even if these sites gave out their
source code, users would not easily be able to create a full copy
of the running application! The application is a dynamically
updated database whose utility comes from its completeness
and concurrency, and in many cases, from the network effect
of its participating users.
(To be sure, there would be many benefits to users were some
of Google’s algorithms public rather than secret, or Amazon’s
1-Click available to all, but the point remains: an instance of
all of Google’s source code would not give you Google, unless
you were also able to build the capability to crawl and mirror
the entire Web in the same way that Google does.)
And the opportunities are not merely up the stack. There are
huge proprietary opportunities hidden inside the system.
Christensen notes:
Attractive profits . . . move elsewhere in the value chain,
often to subsystems from which the modular product is
assembled. This is because it is improvements in the sub-
systems, rather than the modular product’s architecture,
that drives the assembler’s ability to move upmarket
towards more attractive profit margins. Hence, the subsys-
tems become decommoditized and attractively profitable.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 25
We saw this pattern in the PC market with most PCs now
bearing the brand “Intel Inside”; the Internet could just as eas-
ily be branded “Cisco Inside”.
But these “Intel Inside” business opportunities are not always
obvious, nor are they necessarily in proprietary hardware or
software. The open source BIND (Berkeley Internet Name
Daemon) package used to run the Domain Name System
(DNS) provides an important demonstration.
The business model for most of the Internet’s commodity soft-
ware turned out not to be selling that software (despite
shrinkwrapped offerings from vendors such as NetManage
and Spry, now long gone), but in services based on that soft-
ware. Most of those businesses—the Internet Service Providers
(ISPs), who essentially resell access to the TCP/IP protocol
suite and to email and web servers—turned out to be low
margin businesses. There was one notable exception.
BIND is probably the single most mission-critical program on
the Internet, yet its maintainer has scraped by for the past two
decades on donations and consulting fees. Meanwhile, domain
name registration—an information service based on the soft-
ware—became a business generating hundreds of millions of
dollars a year, a virtual monopoly for Network Solutions,
which was handed the business on government contract
before anyone realized just how valuable it would be. The Intel
Inside opportunity of the DNS was not a software opportunity
at all, but the service of managing the namespace used by the
software. By a historical accident, the business model became
separated from the software.
That services based on software would be a dominant busi-
ness model for open source software was recognized in The
Cathedral & The Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s seminal work on the
movement. But in practice, most early open source entrepre-
neurs focused on services associated with the maintenance
26 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
and support of the software, rather than true software as a
service. (That is to say, software as a service is not service in
support of software, but software in support of user-facing
services!)
Dell gives us a final lesson for today’s software industry. Much
as the commoditization of PC hardware drove down IBM’s
outsize margins but vastly increased the size of the market,
creating enormous value for users, and vast opportunities for a
new ecosystem of computer manufacturers for whom the
lower margins of the PC still made business sense, the com-
moditization of software will actually expand the software
market. And as Christensen notes, in this type of market, the
drivers of success “become speed to market and the ability
responsively and conveniently to give customers exactly what
they need, when they need it.”[5]
Following this logic, I believe that the process of building cus-
tom distributions will emerge as one of the key competitive
differentiators among Linux vendors. Much as a Dell must be
an arbitrageur of the various contract manufacturers vying to
produce fungible components at the lowest price, a Linux ven-
dor will need to manage the ever changing constellation of
software suppliers whose asynchronous product releases pro-
vide the raw materials for Linux distributions. Companies like
Debian founder Ian Murdock’s Progeny Systems already see
this as the heart of their business, but even old-line Linux ven-
dors like SuSe and new entrants like Sun tout their release
engineering expertise as a competitive advantage.[6]
But even the most successful of these Linux distribution ven-
dors will never achieve the revenues or profitability of today’s
software giants like Microsoft or Oracle, unless they leverage
some of the other lessons of history. As demonstrated by both
the PC hardware market and the ISP industry (which as noted
above is a service business built on the commodity protocols
and applications of the Internet), commodity businesses are
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 27
low margin for most of the players. Unless companies find
value up the stack or through an “Intel Inside” opportunity,
they must compete only through speed and responsiveness,
and that’s a challenging way to maintain a pricing advantage
in a commodity market.
Early observers of the commodity nature of Linux, such as
Red Hat’s founder Bob Young, believed that advantage was to
be found in building a strong brand. That’s certainly necessary,
but it’s not sufficient. It’s even possible that contract manufac-
turers such as Flextronix, which work behind the scenes as
industry suppliers rather than branded customer-facing entities,
may provide a better analogy than Dell for some Linux vendors.
In conclusion, software itself is no longer the primary locus of
value in the computer industry. The commoditization of soft-
ware drives value to services enabled by that software. New
business models are required.
Network-Enabled Collaboration
To understand the nature of competitive advantage in the new
paradigm, we should look not to Linux, but to the Internet, which
has already shown signs of how the open source story will play out.
The most common version of the history of free software
begins with Richard Stallman’s ethically-motivated 1984 revolt
against proprietary software. It is an appealing story centered
on a charismatic figure, and leads straight into a narrative in
which the license he wrote—the GPL—is the centerpiece. But
like most open source advocates, who tell a broader story
about building better software through transparency and code
sharing, I prefer to start the history with the style of software
development that was normal in the early computer industry
and academia. Because software was not seen as the primary
source of value, source code was freely shared throughout the
early computer industry.
28 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
The Unix software tradition provides a good example. Unix
was developed at Bell Labs, and was shared freely with univer-
sity software researchers, who contributed many of the utili-
ties and features we take for granted today. The fact that Unix
was provided under a license that later allowed ATT to shut
down the party when it decided it wanted to commercialize
Unix, leading ultimately to the rise of BSD Unix and Linux as
free alternatives, should not blind us to the fact that the early,
collaborative development preceded the adoption of an open
source licensing model. Open source licensing began as an
attempt to preserve a culture of sharing, and only later led to
an expanded awareness of the value of that sharing.
For the roots of open source in the Unix community, you can
look to the research orientation of many of the original par-
ticipants. As Bill Joy noted in his keynote at the O’Reilly Open
Source Convention in 1999, in science, you share your data so
other people can reproduce your results. And at Berkeley, he
said, we thought of ourselves as computer scientists.[7]
But perhaps even more important was the fragmented nature
of the early Unix hardware market. With hundreds of compet-
ing computer architectures, the only way to distribute soft-
ware was as source! No one had access to all the machines to
produce the necessary binaries. (This demonstrates the apt-
ness of another of Christensen’s “laws,” the law of conservation
of modularity. Because PC hardware was standardized and
modular, it was possible to concentrate value and uniqueness
in software. But because Unix hardware was unique and pro-
prietary, software had to be made more open and modular.)
This software source code exchange culture grew from its
research beginnings, but it became the hallmark of a large
segment of the software industry because of the rise of
computer networking.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 29
Much of the role of open source in the development of the
Internet is well known: The most widely used TCP/IP protocol
implementation was developed as part of Berkeley networking;
BIND runs the DNS, without which none of the web sites we
depend on would be reachable; sendmail is the heart of the
Internet email backbone; Apache is the dominant web server;
Perl the dominant language for creating dynamic sites; etc.
Less often considered is the role of Usenet in mothering the
Net we now know. Much of what drove public adoption of the
Internet was in fact Usenet, that vast distributed bulletin
board. You “signed up” for Usenet by finding a neighbor will-
ing to give you a newsfeed. This was a true collaborative net-
work, where mail and news were relayed from one cooperating
site to another, often taking days to travel from one end of the
Net to another. Hub sites formed an ad-hoc backbone, but
everything was voluntary.
Rick Adams, who created UUnet, which was the first major
commercial ISP, was a free software author (though he never
subscribed to any of the free software ideals—it was simply an
expedient way to distribute software he wanted to use). He
was the author of B News (at the time the dominant Usenet
news server) as well as SLIP (Serial Line IP), the first imple-
mentation of TCP/IP for dialup lines. But more importantly
for the history of the Net, Adams was also the hostmaster of
the world’s largest Usenet hub. He realized that the voluntary
Usenet was becoming unworkable, and that people would pay
for reliable, well-connected access. UUnet started out as a non-
profit, and for several years, much more of its business was
based on the earlier UUCP (Unix-Unix Copy Protocol) dialup
network than on TCP/IP. As the Internet caught on, UUNet
and others like it helped bring the Internet to the masses. But
at the end of the day, the commercial Internet industry started
out of a need to provide infrastructure for the completely col-
laborative UUCPnet and Usenet.
30 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
The UUCPnet and Usenet were used for email (the first killer
app of the Internet), but also for software distribution and col-
laborative tech support. When Larry Wall (later famous as the
author of Perl) introduced the patch program in 1984, the pon-
derous process of sending around 9-track tapes of source code
was replaced by the transmission of “patches”—editing scripts
that update existing source files. Add in Richard Stallman’s
GNU C compiler (GCC), and early source code control sys-
tems like RCS (eventually replaced by CVS and now
Subversion), and you had a situation where anyone could
share and update free software. The early Usenet was as much
a “Napster” for shared software as it was a place for conversation.
The mechanisms that the early developers used to spread and
support their work became the basis for a cultural phenome-
non that reached far beyond the tech sector. The heart of that
phenomenon was the use of wide-area networking technology
to connect people around interests, rather than through geo-
graphical location or company affiliation. This was the begin-
ning of a massive cultural shift that we’re still seeing today.
This cultural shift may have had its first flowering with open
source software, but it is not intrinsically tied to the use of free
and open source licenses and philosophies.
In 1999, together with Brian Behlendorf of the Apache project,
O’Reilly founded a company called CollabNet to commercial-
ize not the Apache product but the Apache process. Unlike
many other OSS projects, Apache wasn’t founded by a single
visionary developer but by a group of users who’d been aban-
doned by their original “vendor” (NCSA) and who agreed to
work together to maintain a tool they depended on. Apache
gives us lessons about intentional wide-area collaborative soft-
ware development that can be applied even by companies that
haven’t fully embraced open source licensing practices. For
example, it is possible to apply open source collaborative prin-
ciples inside a large company, even without the intention to
release the resulting software to the outside world.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 31
While CollabNet is best known for hosting high profile cor-
porate-sponsored open source projects like OpenOffice.org, its
largest customer is actually HP’s printer division, where
CollabNet’s SourceCast platform is used to help more than
3000 internal developers share their code within the corporate
firewall. Other customers use open-source-inspired development
practices to share code with their customers or business partners,
or to manage distributed worldwide development teams.
But an even more compelling story comes from that archetype
of proprietary software, Microsoft. Far too few people know
the story of the origin of ASP.NET. As told to me by its creators,
Mark Anders and Scott Guthrie, the two of them wanted to re-
engineer Microsoft’s ASP product to make it XML-aware. They
were told that doing so would break backwards compatibility,
and the decision was made to stick with the old architecture.
But when Anders and Guthrie had a month between projects,
they hacked up their vision anyway, just to see where it would
go. Others within Microsoft heard about their work, found it
useful, and adopted pieces of it. Some six or nine months later,
they had a call from Bill Gates: “I’d like to see your project.”
In short, one of Microsoft’s flagship products was born as an
internal “code fork,” the result of two developers “scratching
their own itch,” and spread within Microsoft in much the
same way as open source projects spread on the open Internet.
It appears that open source is the “natural language” of a net-
worked community. Given enough developers and a network to
connect them, open-source-style development behavior emerges.
If you take the position that open source licensing is a means
of encouraging Internet-enabled collaboration, and focus on
the end rather than the means, you’ll open a much larger tent.
You’ll see the threads that tie together not just traditional open
source projects, but also collaborative “computing grid” proj-
ects like SETI@home, user reviews on amazon.com, technolo-
gies like collaborative filtering, new ideas about marketing
such as those expressed in The Cluetrain Manifesto, weblogs,
32 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
and the way that Internet message boards can now move the
stock market. What started out as a software development
methodology is increasingly becoming a facet of every field, as
network-enabled conversations become a principal carrier of
new ideas.
I’m particularly struck by how collaboration is central to the
success and differentiation of the leading Internet applications.
EBay® is an obvious example, almost the definition of a “net-
work effects” business, in which competitive advantage is
gained from the critical mass of buyers and sellers. New
entrants into the auction business have a hard time competing,
because there is no reason for either buyers or sellers to go to
a second-tier player.
Amazon is perhaps even more interesting. Unlike eBay, whose
constellation of products is provided by its users, and changes
dynamically day to day, products identical to those Amazon
sells are available from other vendors. Yet Amazon seems to
enjoy an order-of-magnitude advantage over those other ven-
dors. Why? Perhaps it is merely better execution, better pricing,
better service, better branding. But one clear differentiator is the
superior way that Amazon has leveraged its user community.
In my talks, I give a simple demonstration. I do a search for
products in one of my publishing areas, JavaScriptTM. On , the
search produces a complex page with four main areas. On the
top is a block showing the three “most popular” products.
Down below is a longer search listing that allows the customer
to list products by criteria such as bestselling, highest-rated, by
price, or simply alphabetically. On the right and the left are
user-generated “ListMania” lists. These lists allow customers
to share their own recommendations for other titles related to
the given subject.
The section labeled “most popular” might not jump out at
first. But as a vendor who sells to amazon.com, I know that it
is the result of a complex, proprietary algorithm that combines
not just sales but also the number and quality of user reviews,
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 33
user recommendations for alternative products, links from
ListMania lists, “also bought” associations, and all the other
things that Amazon refers to as the “flow” around products.
The particular search that I like to demonstrate is usually
topped by my own JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. The book
has 192 reviews, averaging 4-1/2 stars. Those reviews are
among the more than ten million user reviews contributed by
amazon.com customers.
Now contrast the #2 player in online books, barnesandno-
ble.com. The top result is a book published by Barnes &
Noble itself, and there is no evidence of user-supplied content.
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide has only 18 comments, the
order-of-magnitude difference in user participation closely
mirroring the order-of-magnitude difference in sales.
Amazon doesn’t have a natural network-effect advantage like
eBay, but they’ve built one by architecting their site for user
participation. Everything from user reviews, alternative prod-
uct recommendations, ListMania, and the Associates pro-
gram, which allows users to earn commissions for recom-
mending books, encourages users to collaborate in enhancing
the site. Amazon Web Services, introduced in 2001, take the
story even further, allowing users to build alternate interfaces
and specialized shopping experiences (as well as other unex-
pected applications) using Amazon’s data and commerce
engine as a back end.
Amazon’s distance from competitors, and the security it enjoys
as a market leader, is driven by the value added by its users. If,
as Eric Raymond said in The Cathedral & The Bazaar, one of
the secrets of open source is “treating your users as co-devel-
opers,” Amazon has learned this secret. But note that it’s com-
pletely independent of open source licensing practices! We
start to see that what has been presented as a rigidly con-
strained model for open source may consist of a bundle of
competencies, not all of which will always be found together.
34 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Google makes a more subtle case for the network-effect story.
Google’s initial innovation was the PageRank algorithm,
which leverages the collective preferences of web users,
expressed by their hyperlinks to sites, to produce better search
results. In Google’s case, the user participation is extrinsic to
the company and its product, and so can be copied by com-
petitors. If this analysis is correct, Google’s long-term success
will depend on finding additional ways to leverage user-created
value as a key part of their offering. Services such as orkut and
Gmail suggest that this lesson is not lost on them.
Now consider a counter-example. MapQuest® is another pio-
neer that created an innovative type of web application that
almost every Internet user relies on. Yet the market is shared
fairly evenly between MapQuest (now owned by AOL),
maps.yahoo.com, and maps.msn.com (powered by MapPoint).
All three provide a commodity-business powered by stan-
dardized software and databases. None of them have made
a concerted effort to leverage user-supplied content, or engage
their users in building out the application. (Note also that all
three are enabling an Intel-Inside style opportunity for
data suppliers such as NAVTEQ, now planning a multibillion
dollar IPO!)
Continued on page 39
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 35
The Architecture of Participation
I’ve come to use the term “the architecture of participation” to
describe the nature of systems that are designed for user contri-
bution. Larry Lessig’s book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,
which he characterizes as an extended meditation on Mitch
Kapor’s maxim, “architecture is politics,” made the case that we
need to pay attention to the architecture of systems if we want to
understand their effects.
I immediately thought of Kernighan and Pike’s description of the
Unix software tools philosophy referred to above. I also recalled
an unpublished portion of the interview we did with Linus
Torvalds to create his essay for the 1998 book, Open Sources.
Torvalds too expressed a sense that architecture may be more
important than source code. “I couldn’t do what I did with Linux
for Windows, even if I had the source code. The architecture just
wouldn’t support it.” Too much of the windows source code con-
sists of interdependent, tightly coupled layers for a single devel-
oper to drop in a replacement module.
And of course, the Internet and the World Wide Web have this
participatory architecture in spades. As outlined above in the sec-
tion on software commoditization, any system designed around
communications protocols is intrinsically designed for participa-
tion. Anyone can create a participating, first-class component.
In addition, the IETF, the Internet standards process, has a great
many similarities with an open source software project. The only
substantial difference is that the IETF’s output is a standards
document rather than a code module. Especially in the early
years, anyone could participate, simply by joining a mailing list
and having something to say, or by showing up to one of the
three annual face-to-face meetings. Standards were decided by
participating individuals, irrespective of their company affilia-
tions. The very name for proposed Internet standards, RFCs
(Request for Comments), reflects the participatory design of the
Net. Though commercial participation was welcomed and
encouraged, companies, like individuals, were expected to com-
pete on the basis of their ideas and implementations, not their
36 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
money or disproportional representation. The IETF approach is
where open source and open standards meet.
And while there are successful open source projects like send-
mail, which are largely the creation of a single individual, and
have a monolithic architecture, those that have built large devel-
opment communities have done so because they have a modular
architecture that allows easy participation by independent or
loosely coordinated developers. The use of Perl, for example,
exploded along with CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive
Network, and Perl’s module system, which allowed anyone to
enhance the language with specialized functions, and make them
available to other users.
The Web, however, took the idea of participation to a new level,
because it opened that participation not just to software devel-
opers but to all users of the system.
It has always baffled and disappointed me that the open source
community has not claimed the Web as one of its greatest suc-
cess stories. If you asked most end users, they are most likely to
associate the Web with proprietary clients such as Microsoft’s
Internet Explorer than with the revolutionary open source archi-
tecture that made the Web possible. That’s a PR failure! Tim
Berners-Lee’s original web implementation was not just open
source, it was public domain. NCSA’s web server and Mosaic
browser were not technically open source, but source was freely
available. While the move of the NCSA team to Netscape sought
to take key parts of the web infrastructure to the proprietary
side, and the Microsoft-Netscape battles made it appear that the
Web was primarily a proprietary software battleground, we should
know better. Apache, the phoenix that grew from the NCSA server,
kept the open vision alive, keeping the standards honest, and not
succumbing to proprietary embrace-and-extend strategies.
But even more significantly, HTML, the language of web pages,
opened participation to ordinary users, not just software devel-
opers. The “View Source” menu item migrated from Tim Berners-
Lee’s original browser, to Mosaic, and then on to Netscape
Navigator and even Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Though no
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 37
one thinks of HTML as an open source technology, its openness
was absolutely key to the explosive spread of the Web. Barriers to
entry for “amateurs” were low, because anyone could look “over
the shoulder” of anyone else producing a web page. Dynamic
content created with interpreted languages continued the trend
toward transparency.
And more germane to my argument here, the fundamental archi-
tecture of hyperlinking ensures that the value of the Web is
created by its users.
In this context, it’s worth noting an observation originally made
by Clay Shirky in a talk at O’Reilly’s 2001 P2P and Web Services
Conference (now renamed the Emerging Technology
Conference), entitled “Listening to Napster.” There are three ways
to build a large database, said Clay. The first, demonstrated by
Yahoo!, is to pay people to do it. The second, inspired by lessons
from the open source community, is to get volunteers to perform
the same task. The Open Directory Project, an open source
Yahoo! competitor, is the result. (Wikipedia provides another
example.) But NapsterTM demonstrates a third way. Because
Napster set its defaults to automatically share any music that was
downloaded, every user automatically helped to build the value
of the shared database.
This architectural insight may actually be more central to the
success of open source than the more frequently cited appeal to
volunteerism. The architecture of Linux, the Internet, and the
World Wide Web are such that users pursuing their own “selfish”
interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct. In
other words, these technologies demonstrate some of the same
network effect as eBay and Napster, simply through the way that
they have been designed.
These projects can be seen to have a natural architecture of par-
ticipation. But as Amazon demonstrates, by consistent effort (as
well as economic incentives such as the Associates program), it is
possible to overlay such an architecture on a system that would
not normally seem to possess it.
38 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Continued from page 35
Customizability and Software-as-Service
The last of my three Cs, customizability, is an essential con-
comitant of software as a service. It’s especially important to
highlight this aspect because it illustrates just why dynamically
typed languages like Perl, Python, and PHP, so-often denigrat-
ed by old-paradigm software developers as mere “scripting
languages,” are so important on today’s software scene.
As I wrote in my 1997 essay, Hardware, Software, and Infoware:
If you look at a large web site like Yahoo!, you’ll see that
behind the scenes, an army of administrators and program-
mers are continually rebuilding the product. Dynamic content
isn’t just automatically generated, it is also often hand-tailored,
typically using an array of quick and dirty scripting tools.
“We don’t create content at Yahoo! We aggregate it,” says
Jeffrey Friedl, author of the book Mastering Regular
Expressions and a full-time Perl programmer at Yahoo! “We
have feeds from thousands of sources, each with its own for-
mat. We do massive amounts of ‘feed processing’ to clean this
stuff up or to find out where to put it on Yahoo!” For example,
to link appropriate news stories to tickers at
finance.yahoo.com, Friedl needed to write a “name recognition”
program able to search for more than 15,000 company names.
Perl’s ability to analyze free-form text with powerful regular
expressions was what made that possible.
Perl has been referred to as “the duct tape of the Internet,” and
dynamic languages like Perl are important to web sites like
Yahoo! and Amazon for the same reason that duct tape is
important not just to heating system repairmen but to anyone
who wants to hold together a rapidly changing installation.
Go to any lecture or stage play, and you’ll see microphone
cords and other wiring held down by duct tape.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 39
We’re used to thinking of software as an artifact rather than a
process. And to be sure, even in the new paradigm, there are
software artifacts, programs, and commodity components that
must be engineered to exacting specifications because they
will be used again and again. But it is in the area of software
that is not commoditized, the “glue” that ties together compo-
nents, the scripts for managing data and machines, and all the
areas that need frequent change or rapid prototyping, that
dynamic languages shine.
Sites like Google, Amazon, or eBay—especially those reflect-
ing the dynamic of user participation—are not just products,
they are processes.
I like to tell people the story of the Mechanical Turk, a 1770
hoax that pretended to be a mechanical chess playing
machine. The secret, of course, was that a man was hidden
inside. The Turk actually played a small role in the history of
computing. When Charles Babbage played against the Turk in
1820 (and lost), he saw through the hoax, but was moved to
wonder whether a true computing machine would be possible.
Now, in an ironic circle, applications once more have people
hidden inside them. Take a copy of Microsoft Word and a
compatible computer, and it will still run ten years from now.
But without the constant crawls to keep the search engine
fresh, the constant product updates at an Amazon or eBay, the
administrators who keep it all running, the editors and design-
ers who integrate vendor- and user-supplied content into the
interface, and in the case of some sites, even the warehouse
staff who deliver the products, the Internet-era application no
longer performs its function.
This is truly not the software business as it was even a
decade ago. Of course, there have always been enterprise
software businesses with this characteristic. (American
Airlines’ Sabre reservations system is an obvious example.) But
only now have they become the dominant paradigm for new
computer-related businesses.
40 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
The first generation of any new technology is typically seen
as an extension to the previous generations. And so, through
the 1990s, most people experienced the Internet as an exten-
sion or add-on to the personal computer. Email and web
browsing were powerful add-ons, to be sure, and they gave
added impetus to a personal computer industry that was run-
ning out of steam.
(Open source advocates can take ironic note of the fact that
many of the most important features of Microsoft’s new oper-
ating system releases since Windows 95 have been designed to
emulate Internet functionality originally created by open
source developers.)
But now, we’re starting to see the shape of a very different
future. Napster brought us peer-to-peer file sharing,
Seti@home introduced millions of people to the idea of dis-
tributed computation, and now web services are starting to
make even huge database-backed sites like Amazon or Google
appear to act like components of an even larger system.
Vendors such as IBM and HP bandy about terms like “com-
puting on demand” and “pervasive computing.”
The boundaries between cell phones, wirelessly connected
laptops, and even consumer devices like the iPod® or TiVO®,
are all blurring. Each now gets a large part of its value from
software that resides elsewhere. Dave Stutz characterizes this
as software above the level of a single device.[8]
Building the Internet Operating System
I like to say that we’re entering the stage where we are going
to treat the Internet as if it were a single virtual computer. To
do that, we’ll need to create an Internet operating system.
The large question before us is this: What kind of operating
system is it going to be? The lesson of Microsoft is that if you
leverage insight into a new paradigm, you will find the secret
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 41
that will give you control over the industry, the “one ring to
rule them all,” so to speak. Contender after contender has set
out to dethrone Microsoft and take that ring from them, only
to fail. But the lesson of open source and the Internet is that
we can build an operating system that is designed from the
ground up as “small pieces loosely joined,” with an architec-
ture that makes it easy for anyone to participate in building the
value of the system.
The values of the free and open source community are an
important part of its paradigm. Just as the Copernican revolu-
tion was part of a broader social revolution that turned society
away from hierarchy and received knowledge, and instead
sparked a spirit of inquiry and knowledge sharing, open
source is part of a communications revolution designed to
maximize the free sharing of ideas expressed in code.
But free software advocates go too far when they eschew any
limits on sharing, and define the movement by adherence to a
restrictive set of software licensing practices. The open source
movement has made a concerted effort to be more inclusive.
Eric Raymond describes The Open Source Definition as a
“provocation to thought,” a “social contract . . . and an invita-
tion to join the network of those who adhere to it.”[9] But even
though the open source movement is much more business
friendly and supports the right of developers to choose non-
free licenses, it still uses the presence of software licenses that
enforce sharing as its litmus test.
The lessons of previous paradigm shifts show us a more sub-
tle and powerful story than one that merely pits a gift culture
against a monetary culture, and a community of sharers ver-
sus those who choose not to participate. Instead, we see a
dynamic migration of value, in which things that were once
kept for private advantage are now shared freely, and things
that were once thought incidental become the locus of enor-
mous value. It’s easy for free and open source advocates to see
42 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
this dynamic as a fall from grace, a hoarding of value that
should be shared with all. But a historical view tells us that the
commoditization of older technologies and the crystallization
of value in new technologies is part of a process that advances
the industry and creates more value for all. What is essential is
to find a balance, in which we as an industry create more value
than we capture as individual participants, enriching the com-
mons that allows for further development by others.
I cannot say where things are going to end. But as Alan Kay
once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”[10]
Where we go next is up to all of us.
Conclusion
The Open Source Definition and works such as The Cathedral
& The Bazaar tried to codify the fundamental principles of
open source.
But as Kuhn notes, speaking of scientific pioneers who opened
new fields of study:
Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract
an enduring group of adherents away from competing
modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficient-
ly open ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined
group of practitioners to resolve. Achievements that share
these two characteristics, I shall refer to as “paradigms.”[11]
In short, if it is sufficiently robust an innovation to qualify as
a new paradigm, the open source story is far from over, and its
lessons far from completely understood. Rather than thinking
of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated
software development practices, we do better to think of it as
a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many his-
torical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic
story. We must understand the impact of such factors as stan-
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 43
dards and their effect on commoditization, system architec-
ture and network effects, and the development practices asso-
ciated with software as a service. We must study these factors
when they appear in proprietary software as well as when they
appear in traditional open source projects. We must under-
stand the ways in which the means by which software is
deployed changes the way in which it is created and used. We
must also see how the same principles that led to early source
code sharing may impact other fields of collaborative activity.
Only when we stop measuring open source by what activities
are excluded from the definition, and begin to study its fellow
travelers on the road to the future, will we understand its true
impact and be fully prepared to embrace the new paradigm.
Footnotes:
1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 7.
2. Ray Kurzweil, speech at the Foresight Senior Associates Gathering,
April 2002.
3. Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Review, Feb 2004 (PDF).
4. I have been talking and writing about the paradigm shift for years, but
until I heard Christensen speak at the Open Source Business Conference in
March 2004, I hadn’t heard his eloquent generalization of the economic
principles at work in what I’d been calling business paradigm shifts. I am
indebted to Christensen and to Dave Stutz, whose recent writings on soft-
ware commoditization have enriched my own views on the subject.
5. Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Review, Feb 2004 (PDF).
6. From private communications with SuSe CTO Juergen Geck and Sun
CTO Greg Papadopoulos.
7. I like to say that software enables speech between humans and comput-
ers. It is also the best way to talk about certain aspects of computer science,
just as equations are the best way to talk about problems in physics. If you
follow this line of reasoning, you realize that many of the arguments for
free speech apply to open source as well. How else do you tell someone
how to talk with their computer other than by sharing the code you used to
do so? The benefits of open source are analogous to the benefits brought by
the free flow of ideas through other forms of information dissemination.
44 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
8. Dave Stutz notes (in a private email response to an early draft of this
piece), this software “includes not only what I call ‘collective software’ that
is aware of groups and individuals, but also software that is customized to
its location on the network, and also software that is customized to a
device or a virtualized hosting environment. These additional types of cus-
tomization lead away from shrinkwrap software that runs on a single PC or
PDA/smartphone and towards personalized software that runs ‘on the net-
work’ and is delivered via many devices simultaneously.”
9. From a private email response from Eric Raymond to an earlier draft of
this paper.
10. Alan Kay, spoken at a 1971 internal Xerox planning meeting, as quoted
at www.lisarein.com/alankay/tour.html.
11. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 10.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 45
Watching the “Alpha
Geeks”: OS X and
the Next Big Thing
This piece is based on my Keynote at the Apple Worldwide
Developer Conference, May 8, 2002. I’ve added to it since then,
as I’ve thought more about the issues it addresses.
We get most of our good ideas at O’Reilly by watching the
“alpha geeks.” We look for people who appear to be doing
magic, and ask them how they do it. (Remember Arthur C.
Clarke’s dictum: “Any sufficiently advanced technology
appears to be magic.”) There are always people in any field
who are the most clued in to the deep trends, who seem to be
playing with all the coolest stuff, and seem to have their finger
in everything before most people even know about it. We get
these people to tell us what they do, and we persuade them to
write it down, or tell it to someone else who can write it down.
If you look at how new technologies come into play, you typi-
cally see this sequence:
1. Someone introduces a fundamental breakthrough, a dis-
ruptive technology, or business model that will change the
nature of the game.
[Aside: The term “disruptive technology” comes from
Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. He
cites two types of innovations: sustaining technologies
(cheaper, faster, better versions of existing technologies)
and disruptive technologies.]
46
Disruptive technologies are often not “better” when they
start out—in fact, they are often worse. Case in point: the
PC. It wasn’t better than the mainframe or minicomputer. It
was a toy. Similarly, the World Wide Web was far less capa-
ble than proprietary CD-ROM hypertext systems and com-
mon desktop apps. And developers of both derided the
Web as slow, ungainly, and ineffective. This is a typical
response to disruptive technologies. Eric Raymond, speak-
ing of open source, quoted Gandhi: “First they laugh at
you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Disruptive technologies often lead to a paradigm shift (I
know the phrase “paradigm shift” gets overused, but in this
case, it’s spot on). The full effect of a disruptive technology
paradigm shift often takes decades to be felt. There were
two paradigm shifts at work in the PC revolution: first, tak-
ing the computer out of the glass house and giving it to
ordinary people; and second, basing computers on com-
modity hardware and industry-standard designs.
There are disruptive business models as well as disruptive
tech. IBM’s decision to “open source” their design and let
other manufacturers copy it was critical to the growth of
the market. It’s why the Intel-based PC and not the superior
Apple Macintosh® became the dominant hardware plat-
form today.
OK. So we have a disruptive innovation.What happens next?
2. Hackers and “alpha geeks” push the envelope, start to use
the new technology, and get more out of their systems long
before ordinary users even know what’s possible.
Both the Internet and open source were part of a hacker
subculture for many years. I got my first email address back
in 1978, when the ArpaNet was exactly the kind of “magic”
I was talking about earlier. Some people had it. Others didn’t.
(And in fact, the origins of sendmail, the mail server that
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 47
still routes the majority of Internet email, were based on
exactly this disparity in skills and access. When he was a
researcher at UCB, Eric Allman had ArpaNet access, and
everyone wanted an account on his machine. He decided it
was easier to route mail from the campus network onto the
ArpaNet than to manage 700 accounts.)
An example that’s still a bit far out, but that I’m confident
is significant: I held a summit of peer-to-peer networking
developers, and when we were sitting around having a beer
afterwards, a young FreeNet developer said to Kevin Lenzo
(who was there because of his early work on IRC infobots):
“You sound familiar.”
Kevin mentioned that he was the developer of festvox, an
open source speech synthesis package, and that he was the
source of one of the voices distributed with the package.
“Oh, that’s why. I listen to you all the time. I pipe IRC to fes-
tival so I can listen to it in the background when I’m coding.”
Now I’ll guarantee that lots of people will routinely be con-
verting text to speech in a few years, and I know it because
the hackers are already doing it. It’s been possible for a long
time, but now it’s ripening toward the mainstream.
3. Entrepreneurs create products that simplify what the hack-
ers came up with; there’s lots of competition around fea-
tures, business model, and architecture.
A good example: On the Web, CGI was originally a hack.
Then we saw a lot of different systems to improve on the
CGI model, and make database-driven web sites easier for
everyone: Cold Fusion, ASP, PHP, JSP.
4. Things get standardized, either by agreement or by some-
one winning dominant market share.
Systems get easier to use by ordinary people, but less satis-
fying for advanced users. During the standardization
process, dominant players put up barriers to entry and try
48 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
to control the market. Entrepreneurs get acquired or squeezed
out. Hackers move on to new areas, looking for “elbow
room.” Innovation slows down. The cycle repeats itself.
The best platforms know how to find a balance between
control and hackability, and the best companies learn how
to disrupt themselves before someone else does it to them.
What Are the Alpha Geeks Telling us Right Now?
1. They are choosing Mac OS® X in overwhelming numbers!
There have been an amazing number of PowerBooks at
recent O’Reilly conferences. The adoption by key open
source communities and leaders is also striking. And of
course, it’s not just hackers, but users who are taking up OS
X in droves. Mac OS X: The Missing Manual is our fastest-
selling new book since The Whole Internet User’s Guide &
Catalog in 1992-1993, when the commercial Internet started
to take off.
Why?
• One reason is what I call “guilt-free computing.” (Even
hackers need to deal with office apps.) But everyone
except the most diehard free software advocates tends
to run dual-boot PCs with Linux® or FreeBSD and
Windows®. And they look guiltily over their shoulder
whenever they’re using Windows in public. With OS X,
you get the best of both worlds in a guilt-free package!
Plus Office apps, a modern GUI, and all the power of
Unix development and scripting tools.
• Wireless support. The fact that 802.11b support is built-
in is a huge win for hackers.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 49
• The iApps. Apple has really built the future into this
machine. iMovie®, iPhotoTM, iTunes® are all very appeal-
ing built-ins.
• Sleek new packaging. The machines are just cool.
What are the hackers telling us beyond the fact that they
like OS X?
2. Assume network connectivity is central; don’t treat it as an
add-on. Also assume cheap local storage.
NapsterTM was perhaps the first killer app that illustrated
this assumption of connectivity. It may have been shut
down by the legal system, but the ideas behind it are blind-
ingly obvious in retrospect. MP3.com built massive server
farms to host downloadable music archives, an approach
mired in the previous generation of computing.
Meanwhile, Shawn Fanning, a young student who’d grown
up in the age of the Internet, asked himself, “Why do I need
to have all the songs in one place? My friends already have
them. All I need is a way for them to point to each other.”
When everyone is connected, all that needs to be central-
ized is the knowledge of who has what.
We’re also seeing this mindset in projects like BitTorrent.
By streaming downloads not from single sites but from a
mesh of cooperating PCs, BitTorrent provides raw Internet
performance increases and creates a global grid of high-
performance anonymous storage.
Bob Morris, vice president at IBM Almaden, pointed out a
key part of the new paradigm: storage is getting cheaper
even faster than ad hoc peer-to-peer networking is. So we
can assume people are on, redundant resources come and
go, and find ways to navigate that paradigm. It’s really excit-
ing to see that Apple totally gets this, with RendezvousTM
50 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
and the sharing features in iTunes. It’s also so impressive
that Steve Jobs is willing to stand up to the copyright bul-
lies and argue for the disruptive paradigm.
3. 802.11b (WiFi) networking is a must-have,not a nice-to-have.
Some of my favorite hacker exploits are in the 802.11 space
right now. Hackers are wiring their own communities. They
are extending the range of 802.11b networks with home-
made antennas, made from coffee cans.
And of course, Apple gets wireless. 802.11 is a key part of
why hackers like Mac® laptops. The fact that it’s hidden
inside the case just makes it a natural part of today’s laptop,
rather than an add-on. And features like the integration of
wireless with Rendezvous and iTunes are great.
4. Chat matters.
Long derided as a toy, chat is becoming one of the key new
apps—and what’s more, key platform functionality. It’s not
just chat between people, but chat between programs. As
described in Programming Jabber, DJ Adams has been using
Jabber®, the XML-based open source IM framework, to
control SAP from a cell phone, using Jabber IM as the
transport. Other folks are writing IM bots that answer
questions and interact with users.
5. Web Services are already a reality.
Hackers are building unauthorized interfaces via web spi-
dering and screen-scraping. They think of web-facing data-
bases as software components to be recombined in new
ways, and with new interfaces. At O’Reilly, we’ve built a
whole custom set of market research interfaces to Amazon
by spidering every computer book on Amazon every three
hours, collecting vital statistics like author, publisher, page
count, price, sales rank, and number and nature of cus-
tomer reviews.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 51
Early do-it-yourself web services have tended to be ineffi-
cient, brute-force spiders, built that way because that’s the
only way possible. We’re finally starting to see true web
services from Amazon, Google, eBay®, and other sites that
offer XML-based APIs. They’ve realized that it’s in their
self-interest to allow remote programmers to request the
data they need, and to re-use it in creative new ways.
These four things—ad-hoc peer-to-peer networking, or
RendezvousTM (as Apple now calls it); wireless networking;
chat as transport; and web sites as software components, or
web services—all come together (along with a couple of
other things, such as grid computing) into what I call the
“emergent Internet operating system.” We really are build-
ing a next generation operating system for the Net. The
question is what kind of operating system we want it to be.
I noted earlier that after the hackers push the envelope,
entrepreneurs start to simplify it. Hackers have been doing
the kind of things that we see in OS X for awhile, but
they’ve had to do them the hard way. Apple has started to
make it easy, so ordinary people can enjoy the benefits.
A good example is Apple’s integration of Yahoo! Finance
and MapQuest right into Sherlock®, rather than just
through the browser. Perl hackers have been able to do this
kind of integration for years, but ordinary people couldn’t
enjoy it. One of the challenges, though, is not just to inte-
grate these things into an application other than the brows-
er, but to expose APIs so that all developers can work with
them. Data-driven web sites need to be seen as software
components. Google’s API is a good step in the right direc-
tion, but all data-driven web sites need to start thinking
of themselves as program-callable software components
for developers.
Marc Andreesen once dismissively referred to Windows as
“just a bag of drivers,” but in fact, that was its genius. The
52 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Win32 API took some of the pain out of supporting
devices, so that application developers didn’t have to do lots
of one-off interfaces. And one of the challenges of the
“Internet OS” is to figure out the “bag of drivers” we need
now. What are the services that we want to integrate that
developers want to use? I believe that web databases are
part of what we need standard “drivers” for.
That’s ultimately what Microsoft’s .NET is about—defin-
ing a standard set of Net-facing programming services.
And Apple is showing that they have a lot of the same
moxie. But since they don’t have the clout to own the whole
thing, they are trying to inter-operate with the functionali-
ty that is out there. That’s one of the most exciting things
about OS X: the integration of services from AOL (AIM
and MapQuest) and Yahoo!. It’s absolutely the right thing
to do.
What’s particularly interesting here is also the way that a
non-controlling player has to do “integration into the OS.”
Microsoft has typically integrated functionality that
replaces or competes with the work of some existing player
(Netscape, Real Networks, AOL), while Apple is having to
find ways to integrate support for the existing players.
And of course, if the OS is an Internet OS rather than a PC
OS, then the PC OSs are themselves software components
of that larger OS. Apple seems to understand that.
So, if we’re building an Internet OS, what kind of OS would
we like it to be?
Architecture Matters
That’s where we can learn a lot from the design of Unix and
the Internet. I’m talking about design at a very high level, the
“architecture is politics” level that Larry Lessig describes so
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 53
well in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Both
Unix and the Internet are loosely coupled protocol-centric sys-
tems rather than API-centric systems.
Kernighan and Pike’s classic, The Unix Programming
Environment, offers a clear formulation of the few simple rules
that made Unix work and laid the groundwork for what I call
the architecture of participation. Use ASCII as a common data
format. Write standard output and read standard input. Write
small programs that work with other programs in a pipeline.
This architecture made it possible for individuals all over the
world to write programs without any central coordination.
More than licensing, I think that architecture is behind the
success of Unix, and ultimately Linux.
Similarly, the Internet was based on what Jon Postel, in the
RFC for TCP, called “the robustness principle”: “Be conserva-
tive in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”
In other words, try to be interoperable.
The Internet architecture has flourished for 25+ years because
of the robustness principle, and because it has a loosely cou-
pled architecture in which the intelligence is in the endpoints,
not in some central registry. Loosely connected actors, low bar-
riers to entry . . . these matter.
Apple seems to be on the right track with OS X. It’s building
the future into the system, in terms of the technology choices
it’s making. It’s building on an open, extensible framework in
the form of Darwin and FreeBSD. It’s learning lessons from the
open source community.
Now, as developers, you have to do the same thing. Think net-
work. Think open. Think extensible. Play well with others.
54 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Hardware, Software,
and Infoware
A chapter in our book Open Sources, which was published in
January 1999. This is based on a talk I gave in March 1997, at the
Linux Kongress in Wurzburg, the same conference where Eric
Raymond first presented The Cathedral & The Bazaar. It’s an
early rumination on open source and networked computing as
catalysts for what I now call the Internet Operating System.
I was talking with some friends recently, friends who don’t
own a computer. They were thinking of getting one so they
could use Amazon.com to buy books and CDs. Not to use
“the Internet,” not to use “the Web,” but to use Amazon.com.
Now, that’s the classic definition of a “killer application”: one
that makes someone go out and buy a computer.
What’s interesting is that the killer application is no longer a
desktop productivity application or even a back-office enter-
prise software system, but an individual web site. And once
you start thinking of web sites as applications, you soon come
to realize that they represent an entirely new breed, something
you might call an “information application,” or perhaps even
“infoware.”
Information applications are used to computerize tasks that
just couldn’t be handled in the old computing model. A few
years ago, if you wanted to search a database of a million
books, you talked to a librarian, who knew the arcane search
syntax of the available computerized search tools and might
55
be able to find what you wanted. If you wanted to buy a book,
you went to a bookstore, and looked through its relatively
small selection. Now, tens of thousands of people with no spe-
cialized training find and buy books online from that million-
record database every day.
The secret is that computers have come one step closer to the
way that people communicate with each other. Web-based
applications use plain English to build their interface—words
and pictures, not specialized little controls that acquire mean-
ing only as you learn the software.
Traditional software embeds small amounts of information in
a lot of software; infoware embeds small amounts of software
in a lot of information. The “actions” in an infoware product
are generally fairly simple: make a choice, buy or sell, enter a
small amount of data, and get back a customized result.
These actions are often accomplished by scripts attached to a
hypertext link using an interface specification called CGI (the
Common Gateway Interface). CGI defines a way for a web
server to call any external program and return the output of
that program as a web page. CGI programs may simply be
small scripts that perform a simple calculation, or they may
connect to a full-fledged back-end database server. But even
when there’s a heavy-duty software engine behind a site, the
user interface itself is not composed of traditional software.
The interface consists of web pages (which may well have been
created by a writer, editor, or designer rather than by a pro-
grammer).
Information interfaces are typically dynamic. For example,
Amazon.com’s presentation of books is driven by sales rank-
ings that are updated every hour. Customers can add com-
ments and ratings on the fly, which then become a key part of
the information-rich decision-support interface for pur-
chasers. A site designed to help someone buy or sell stocks
online needs to not only present updated share prices, but also
56 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
the latest relevant news stories, insider trading information,
analyst recommendations, and perhaps even user discussion
groups. The information interface thus typically consists of a
rich mix of hand-crafted documents, program-generated data,
and links to specialized application servers (such as email,
chat, or conferencing).
Information interfaces are not as efficient for tasks that you do
over and over as pure software interfaces, but they are far bet-
ter for tasks you do only rarely, or differently each time. In par-
ticular, they are good for interfaces in which you make choices
based on information presented to you. Whether you’re buying
a book or CD at Amazon.com, or a stock at E*Trade, the actual
purchase is a fairly trivial part of the interaction. It’s the qual-
ity of the information provided to help you make a decision
that forms the heart of the application you interact with.
The way the Web is transforming the whole computing para-
digm was never clearer to me than back in 1994, before
Microsoft had gotten the web religion, and I shared the stage
(via satellite) with Microsoft VP Craig Mundie at an NTT
event in Japan. Mundie was demonstrating the planned inter-
face for Microsoft’s “Tiger” server, which was supposed to
enable video on demand. The interface emulated Windows,
with cascading menus responding to a kind of virtual remote
control channel clicker.
It was pretty obvious to those of us who were involved in the
Web that the right interface for video on demand, when and if
it comes, will be a web-like information interface. It’s ironic
that even then, Microsoft had the perfect interface for video-
on-demand: its own CD-ROM-based movie encyclopedia,
Cinemania®. What better way to choose what movie to watch
than to search by category, read a few reviews, watch a few film
clips, and then, homework done, click on a hypertext link to
start the movie? Cinemania has it all but the last step. It’s not
until hypertext-based information products are connected to
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 57
network servers that their real power becomes apparent.
Suddenly, information is not an end in itself, but an interface
that allows a user to control an application space far too com-
plex for a traditional software application. (Amazon.com
clearly knows this: their purchase of the Internet Movie
Database, a collection of user reviews and other information
about movies, will put them in pole position not only for sell-
ing videotapes online, but as a future gateway for video-on-
demand services.)
Information interfaces are particularly appropriate for deci-
sion-support applications, but they also make sense for one-
time tasks. In a sense, the use of “wizards” for software instal-
lation is an example of the same trend.
There are also information applications that use a simpler,
more software-like interface for user interaction, but provide
dynamic information output. My favorite example is some-
thing that would have been virtually unthinkable as an appli-
cation only a few years ago: getting maps and directions. A
mapping site like maps.yahoo.com lets you type in two
addresses, and get back a map and a set of directions showing
how to get to one from the other.
So what does all this have to do with open source software?
There’s an obvious answer: most of the technologies that make
the Web possible are open source.
The Internet itself—features like the TCP/IP network protocol
and key infrastructure elements such as the Domain Name
System (DNS) were developed through the open-source
process. It’s easy to argue that the open source BIND (Berkeley
Internet Name Daemon) program that runs the DNS is the
single most mission-critical Internet application. Even though
most web browsing is done with proprietary products
(Netscape’s Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), both
are outgrowths of Tim Berners-Lee’s original open source web
58 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
implementation
and
open
protocol
specification.
According to the automated Netcraft web server survey
(www.netcraft.co.uk/survey), more than 50% of all visible web
sites are served by the open source Apache web server. The
majority of web-based dynamic content is generated by open
source scripting languages such as Perl, Python, and Tcl.
But this obvious answer is only part of the story. After all, why
is it the Web and not some proprietary technology that is the
basis for the networked information applications of the
future?
Microsoft actually was ahead of the curve in realizing the
power of online multimedia. In 1994, when the Web started to
take off, Microsoft’s CD-ROM products like Encarta®, their
online encyclopedia, and Cinemania, their online movie refer-
ence, were ahead of the Web in providing online hyperlinked
documents with rich multimedia capabilities. Microsoft even
realized that it was important to provide information
resources via online networks.
There was only one problem with Microsoft’s vision of the
Microsoft Network: barriers to entry were high. Publishers
were expected to use proprietary Microsoft tools, to apply and
be approved by Microsoft, and to pay to play. By contrast, any-
one could start a web site. The software you needed was free.
The specifications for creating documents and dynamic con-
tent were simple, open, and clearly documented.
Perhaps even more important, both the technology and the
Internet ethic made it legitimate to copy features from other
people’s web sites. The HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
pages that were used to implement various features on a web
site could be easily saved and imitated. Even the CGI scripts
used to create dynamic content were available for copying.
Although traditional computer languages like C run faster,
Perl became the dominant language for CGI because it was
more accessible. While Perl is powerful enough to write major
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 59
applications, it is possible for amateurs to write small scripts
to accomplish specialized tasks. Even more important,
because Perl is not a compiled language, the scripts that are
used on web pages can be viewed, copied, and modified by
users. In addition, archives of useful Perl scripts were set up
and freely shared among web developers. The easy cloning of
web sites built with the HTML+CGI+Perl combination meant
that for the first time, powerful applications could be created
by non-programmers.
In this regard, it’s interesting to point out that the software
industry’s first attempts to improve on the web interface for
active content—technologies like browser-side JavaTM applets
and Microsoft ActiveX® controls—failed because they were
aimed at professional programmers and could not easily be
copied and implemented by the amateurs who were building
the Web. Vendors viewed the Web in software terms, and didn’t
understand that the Web was changing not only what appli-
cations were being built but what tools their builders needed.
Industry analysts have been predicting for years that Perl and
CGI will be eclipsed by newer software technologies. But even
now, when major web sites employ large staffs of professional
programmers, and newer technologies like Microsoft’s Active
Server Pages (ASP) and Sun’s Java servlets are supplanting CGI
for performance reasons, Perl continues to grow in popularity.
Perl and other open source scripting languages such as Python
and Tcl remain central to web sites large and small because
infoware applications are fundamentally different than soft-
ware applications and require different tools.
If you look at a large web site like Yahoo!, you’ll see that
behind the scenes, an army of administrators and program-
mers are continually rebuilding the product. Dynamic content
isn’t just automatically generated, it is also often hand-tailored,
typically using an array of quick and dirty scripting tools.
60 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
“We don’t create content at Yahoo! We aggregate it,” says
Jeffrey Friedl, author of the book Mastering Regular
Expressions and a full-time Perl programmer at Yahoo!. “We
have feeds from thousands of sources, each with its own for-
mat. We do massive amounts of ‘feed processing’ to clean this
stuff up or to find out where to put it on Yahoo!.” For exam-
ple, to link appropriate news stories to tickers at
quotes.yahoo.com, Friedl needed to write a “name recogni-
tion” program able to search for more than 15,000 company
names. Perl’s ability to analyze free-form text with powerful
regular expressions was what made that possible.
Perl is also a central component in the system administration
infrastructure used to keep the site live and current. Vast num-
bers of Perl scripts are continually crawling the Yahoo! servers
and their links to external sites, and paging the staff whenever
a URL doesn’t return the expected result. The best-known of
these crawlers is referred to as “the Grim Reaper.” If an auto-
mated connection to a URL fails more than the specified num-
ber of times, the page is removed from the Yahoo! directory.
Amazon.com is also a heavy user of Perl. The Amazon.com
authoring environment demonstrates Perl’s power to tie
together disparate computing tools; it’s a “glue language” par
excellence. A user creates a new document with a form that
calls up a Perl program, which generates a partially-completed
SGML document, then launches either Microsoft Word or
GNU Emacs (at the user’s choice), but also integrates CVS
(Concurrent Versioning System) and Amazon.com’s home-
grown SGML tools. The Amazon.com SGML classes are used
to render different sections of the web site—for example,
HTML with or without graphics—from the same source base.
A Perl-based parser renders the SGML into HTML for
approval before the author commits the changes.
Perl has been called “the duct tape of the Internet,” and like
duct tape, it is used in all kinds of unexpected ways. Like a
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 61
movie set held together with duct tape, a web site is often put
up and torn down in a day, and needs lightweight tools and
quick but effective solutions.
Microsoft’s failed attempt to turn infoware back into software
with ActiveX® is rooted in the way paradigms typically shift in
the computer industry. As a particular market segment
matures, the existing players have an enormous vested interest
in things continuing the way they are. This makes it difficult
for them to embrace anything really new, and allows—almost
requires—that new players (“the barbarians,” to use Philippe
Kahn’s phrase) come in to create the new markets.
Microsoft’s ascendancy over IBM as the ruling power of the
computer industry is a classic example of how this happened
the last time around. IBM gave away the market to Microsoft
because it didn’t see that the shift of power was not only from
the glass house to the desktop, but also from proprietary to
commodity hardware and from hardware to software.
In the same way, despite its attempts to get into various infor-
mation businesses, Microsoft still doesn’t realize—perhaps
can’t realize and still be Microsoft—that software, as
Microsoft has known it, is no longer the central driver of value
creation in the computer business.
In the days of IBM’s dominance, hardware was king, and the
barriers to entry into the computer business were high. Most
software was created by the hardware vendors, or by software
vendors who were satellite to them.
The availability of the PC as a commodity platform (as well as
the development of open systems platforms such as Unix)
changed the rules in a fundamental way. Suddenly, the barri-
ers to entry were low, and entrepreneurs such as Mitch Kapor
of Lotus and Bill Gates took off.
If you look at the early history of the Web, you see a similar
pattern. Microsoft’s monopoly on desktop software had made
62 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
the barriers to entry in the software business punishingly
high. What’s more, software applications had become increas-
ingly complex, with Microsoft putting up deliberate barriers
to entry against competitors. It was no longer possible for a
single programmer in a garage (or a garret) to make an impact.
This is perhaps the most important point to make about open
source software: it lowers the barriers to entry into the soft-
ware market. You can try a new product for free—and even
more than that, you can build your own custom version of it,
also for free. Source code is available for massive independent
peer review. If someone doesn’t like a feature, they can add to
it, subtract from it, or reimplement it. If they give their fix back
to the community, it can be adopted widely very quickly.
What’s more, because developers (at least initially) aren’t try-
ing to compete on the business end, but instead focus simply
on solving real problems, there is room for experimentation in
a less punishing environment. As has often been said, open
source software “lets you scratch your own itch.” Because of
the distributed development paradigm, with new features
being added by users, open source programs “evolve” as much
as they are designed.
Indeed, the evolutionary forces of the market are freer to oper-
ate as nature “intended” when unencumbered by marketing
barriers or bundling deals, the equivalent of prosthetic devices
that help the less-than-fit survive.
Evolution breeds not a single winner, but diversity.
It is precisely the idiosyncratic nature of many of the open
source programs that is their greatest strength. Again, it’s
instructive to look at the reasons for Perl’s success.
Larry Wall originally created Perl to automate some repetitive
system administration tasks he was faced with. After releasing
the software to the Net, he found more and more applications,
and the language grew, often in unexpected directions.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 63
Perl has been described as a “kitchen sink language” because
its features seem chaotic to the designers of more “orthogonal”
computer languages. But chaos can often reveal rich structure.
Chaos may also be required to model what is inherently com-
plex. Human languages are complex because they model real-
ity. As Wall says, “English is useful because it’s a mess. Since
English is a mess, it maps well onto the problem space, which
is also a mess. . . . Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess
(though in the nicest of possible ways).”
The open source development paradigm is an incredibly effi-
cient way of getting developers to work on features that mat-
ter. New software is developed in a tight feedback loop with
customer demand, without distortions caused by marketing
clout or top-down purchasing decisions. Bottom-up software
development is ideal for solving bottom-up problems.
Using the open source software at the heart of the Web, and its
simpler development paradigm, entrepreneurs like Jerry Yang
and David Filo were able to do just that. It’s no accident that
Yahoo!, the world’s largest and most successful web site, is
built around freely available open source software: the
FreeBSD operating system, Apache, and Perl.
Just as it was last time around, the key to the next stage of the
computer industry is in fact the commoditization of the previ-
ous stage. As Bob Young of Red Hat®, the leading Linux® dis-
tributor, has noted, his goal is not to dethrone Microsoft at the
top of the operating systems heap, but rather, to shrink the
dollar value of the operating systems market.
The point is that open source software doesn’t need to beat
Microsoft at its own game. Instead it is changing the nature of
the game.
To be sure, for all their astronomical market capitalization,
information-application providers such as Amazon.com and
Yahoo! are still tiny compared to Microsoft. But the writing on
64 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
the wall is clear. The edges of human-computer interaction, the
opportunities for computerizing tasks that haven’t been com-
puterized before, are in infoware, not in software.
As the new “killer applications” emerge, the role of software
will increasingly be as an enabler for infoware. There are enor-
mous commercial opportunities to provide web servers, data-
base backends and application servers, and network program-
ming languages like Java, as long as these products fit them-
selves into the new model rather than trying to supplant it.
Note that in the shift from a hardware-centric to a software-
centric computer industry, hardware didn’t go away. IBM still
flourishes as a company (though most of its peers have down-
sized or capsized). But other hardware players emerged who
were suited to the new rules: Dell, Compaq, and especially Intel.
Intel realized that the real opportunity for them was not in
winning the computer systems wars, but in being an arms sup-
plier to the combatants.
The real challenge for open source software is not whether it
will replace Microsoft in dominating the desktop, but rather
whether it can craft a business model that will help it to
become the “Intel Inside” of the next generation of computer
applications.
Otherwise, the open source pioneers will be shouldered aside
just as Digital Research was in the PC operating system busi-
ness by someone who understands precisely where the current
opportunity lies.
But however that turns out, open source software has already
created a fork in the road. Just as the early microcomputer
pioneers (in both hardware and software) set the stage for
today’s industry, open source software has set the stage for the
drama that is just now unfolding, and that will lead to a radi-
cal reshaping of the computer industry landscape over the
next five to ten years.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 65
On
Publishing
Piracy is Progressive
Taxation
and Six Other Lessons on the
Evolution of Online Distribution
December 2002
The continuing controversy over online file sharing sparks me to
offer a few thoughts as an author and publisher. To be sure, I
write and publish neither movies nor music, but books. But I
think that some of the lessons of my experience still apply.
Lesson 1
Obscurity is a Far Greater Threat to Authors
and Creative Artists than Piracy.
Let me start with book publishing. More than 100,000 books
are published each year, with several million books in print,
yet fewer than 10,000 of those new books have any significant
sales, and only a hundred thousand or so of all the books in
print are carried in even the largest stores. Most books have a
few months on the shelves of the major chains, and then wait
in the darkness of warehouses from which they will move
only to the recycling bin. Authors think that getting a pub-
lisher will be the realization of their dreams, but for so many,
it’s just the start of a long disappointment.
Sites like Amazon that create a virtual storefront for all the
books in print cast a ray of light into the gloom of those ware-
houses, and so books that would otherwise have no outlet at
all can be discovered and bought. Authors who are fortunate
enough to get the rights to their books back from the pub-
lisher often put them up freely online, in hopes of finding
68
readers. The Web has been a boon for readers, since it makes it
easier to spread book recommendations and to purchase the
books once you hear about them. But even then, few books
survive their first year or two in print. Empty the warehouses
and you couldn’t give many of them away.
Many works linger in deserved obscurity, but so many more
suffer simply from the vast differential between supply
and demand.
I don’t know the exact size of the entire CD catalog, but I
imagine that it is similar in scope. Tens of thousands of musi-
cians self-publish their own CDs; a happy few get recording
contracts. Of those, fewer still have their records sell in appre-
ciable numbers. The deep backlist of music publishers is lost
to consumers because the music just isn’t available in stores.
There are fewer films, to be sure, because of the cost of film
making, but even there, obscurity is a constant enemy.
Thousands of independent film makers are desperate for dis-
tribution. A few independent films, like Denmark’s Dogme
films, get visibility. But for most, visibility is limited to occa-
sional showings at local film festivals. The rise of digital video
also promises that film making will soon be as much a garage
opportunity as starting a rock band, and as much of a garret
opportunity as the great American novel.
Lesson 2
Piracy is Progressive Taxation.
For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity,
being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning
achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which
may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known
artists (and I say “may” because even that point is not proven),
in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for
whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 69
Our current distribution systems for books, music, and movies
are skewed heavily in favor of the “haves” against the “have
nots.” A few high-profile products receive the bulk of the pro-
motional budget and are distributed in large quantities; the
majority depend, in the words of Tennessee Williams’ charac-
ter Blanche DuBois, “on the kindness of strangers.”
Lowering the barriers to entry in distribution, and the contin-
uous availability of the entire catalog rather than just the most
popular works, is good for artists, since it gives them a chance
to build their own reputation and visibility, working with
entrepreneurs of the new medium who will be the publishers
and distributors of tomorrow.
I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sam-
ple countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic
for their music, go out to purchase CDs. My daughter now
owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less
exploratory listening. What’s more, she has introduced me to
her favorite music, and I too have bought CDs as a result. And
no, she isn’t downloading Britney Spears, but forgotten bands
from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, as well as their musical fore-
bears in other genres. This is music that is difficult to find—
except online—but, once found, leads to a focused search for
CDs, records, and other artifacts. eBay is doing a nice business
with much of this material, even if the RIAA fails to see the
opportunity.
Lesson 3
Customers Want to Do the Right Thing, if They Can.
Piracy is a loaded word, which we used to reserve for whole-
sale copying and resale of illegitimate product. The music and
film industry usage, applying it to peer-to-peer file sharing, is
a disservice to honest discussion.
70 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Online file sharing is the work of enthusiasts who are trading
their music because there is no legitimate alternative. Piracy is
an illegal commercial activity that is typically a substantial
problem only in countries without strong enforcement of
existing copyright law.
At O’Reilly, we publish many of our books in online form.
There are people who take advantage of that fact to redistrib-
ute unpaid copies. (The biggest problem, incidentally, is not on
file sharing networks, but from copies of our CD Bookshelf
product line being put up on public web servers, or copied
wholesale and offered for sale on eBay.) While these pirated
copies are annoying, they hardly destroy our business. We’ve
found little or no abatement of sales of printed books that are
also available for sale online.
What’s more, many of those who do infringe respond to little
more than a polite letter asking them to take the materials
down. Those servers that ignore our requests are typically in
countries where the books are not available for sale or are far
too expensive for local consumers to buy.
What’s even more interesting, though, is that our enforcement
activities are customer-driven. We receive thousands of emails
from customers letting us know about infringing copies and
sites. Why? They value our company and our authors, and they
want to see our work continue. They know that there is a legit-
imate way to pay for online access—our Safari® Books Online
subscription service (safari.oreilly.com) can be had for as little
as $9.99 a month—and accordingly recognize free copies
as illegitimate.
A similar data point comes from Jon Schull, the former CTO
of Softlock, the company that worked with Stephen King on
his eBook experiment, Riding the Bullet. Softlock, which used
a strong DRM scheme, was relying on “superdistribution” to
reduce the costs of hosting the content—the idea that cus-
tomers would redistribute their copies to friends, who would
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 71
then simply need to download a key to unlock said copy. But
most of the copies were downloaded anyway and very few
were passed along. Softlock ran a customer survey to find out
why there was so little “pass-along” activity. The answer, sur-
prisingly, was that customers didn’t understand that redistrib-
ution was desired. They didn’t do it because they “thought it
was wrong.”
The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digi-
tal copies of music and movies is to give those customers a
legitimate alternative, at a fair price.
Lesson 4
Shoplifting is a Bigger Threat than Piracy.
While few of the people putting books on public web servers
seek to profit from the activity, those who are putting up CDs
for sale on eBay containing PDF or HTML copies of dozens of
books are in fact practicing piracy—organized copying of con-
tent for resale.
But even so, we see no need for stronger copyright laws, or
strong Digital Rights Management software, because existing
law allows us to prosecute the few deliberate pirates.
We don’t have a substantial piracy problem in the U.S. and
Europe. The fact that its software products have been available
for years on Warez sites (and now on file trading networks) has
not kept Microsoft from becoming one of the world’s largest
and most successful companies. Estimates of “lost” revenue
assume that illicit copies would have been paid for; mean-
while, there is no credit on the other side of the ledger for
copies that are sold because of “upgrades” from familiarity
bred by illicit copies.
What we have is a problem that is analogous, at best, to
shoplifting, an annoying cost of doing business.
72 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
And overall, as a book publisher who also makes many of our
books available in electronic form, we rate the piracy problem
as somewhere below shoplifting as a tax on our revenues.
Consistent with my observation that obscurity is a greater
danger than piracy, shoplifting of a single copy can lead to lost
sales of many more. If a bookstore has only one copy of your
book, or a music store one copy of your CD, a shoplifted copy
essentially makes it disappear from the next potential buyer’s
field of possibility. Because the store’s inventory control system
says the product hasn’t been sold, it may not be reordered for
weeks or months, perhaps not at all.
I have many times asked a bookstore why they didn’t have
copies of one of my books, only to be told, after a quick look
at the inventory control system: “But we do. It says we still
have one copy in stock, and it hasn’t sold in months, so we see
no need to reorder.” It takes some prodding to force the point
that perhaps it hasn’t sold because it is no longer on the shelf.
Because an online copy is never out of stock, we at least
have a chance at a sale, rather than being subject to the
enormous inefficiencies and arbitrary choke points in the dis-
tribution system.
Lesson 5
File Sharing Networks Don’t Threaten Book, Music,
or Film Publishing. They Threaten Existing Publishers.
The music and film industries like to suggest that file sharing
networks will destroy their industries.
Those who make this argument completely fail to understand
the nature of publishing. Publishing is not a role that will be
undone by any new technology, since its existence is mandat-
ed by mathematics. Millions of buyers and millions of sellers
cannot find one another without one or more middlemen
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 73
who, like a kind of step-down transformer, segment the market
into more manageable pieces. In fact, there is usually a rich
ecology of middlemen. Publishers aggregate authors for
retailers. Retailers aggregate customers for publishers.
Wholesalers aggregate small publishers for retailers and small
retailers for publishers. Specialty distributors find ways into
non-standard channels.
Those of us who watched the rise of the Web as a new medi-
um for publishing have seen this ecology evolve within less
than a decade. In the Web’s early days, rhetoric claimed that we
faced an age of disintermediation, that everyone could be his
or her own publisher. But before long, individual web site
owners were paying others to help them increase their visibil-
ity in Yahoo!, Google, and other search engines (the equivalent
of Barnes & Noble and Borders for the Web), and web authors
were happily writing for sites like AOL and MSN, or on the
technology side, CNET, Slashdot, O’Reilly Network, and other
web publishers. Meanwhile, authors from Matt Drudge to
Dave Winer and Cory Doctorow made their names by pub-
lishing for the new medium.
As Jared Diamond points out in his book Guns, Germs, and
Steel, mathematics is behind the rise of all complex
social organization.
There is nothing in technology that changes the fundamental
dynamic by which millions of potentially fungible products
reach millions of potential consumers. The means by which
aggregation and selection are made may change with technol-
ogy, but the need for aggregation and selection will not.
Google’s use of implicit peer recommendation in its page rank-
ings plays much the same role as the large retailers’ use of
detailed sell-through data to help them select their offerings.
The question before us is not whether technologies such as
peer-to-peer file sharing will undermine the role of the creative
artist or the publisher, but how creative artists can leverage
74 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
new technologies to increase the visibility of their work. For
publishers, the question is whether they will understand how
to perform their role in the new medium before someone else
does. Publishing is an ecological niche; new publishers will
rush in to fill it if the old ones fail to do so.
If we take the discussion back to first principles, we under-
stand that publishing isn’t just about physical aggregation of
product but also requires an intangible aggregation and man-
agement of “reputation.” People go to Google or Yahoo!,
Barnes & Noble or Borders, HMV, or MediaPlay, because they
believe that they will find what they want there. And they seek
out particular publishers, like Knopf or O’Reilly, because we
have built a track-record of trust in our ability to find inter-
esting topics and skilled authors.
Now, let’s take this discussion over to music file sharing. How
do people find songs on Kazaa or any of the other post-
Napster file sharing services? First, they may be looking for a
song they already know. But such searches for a known artist
or song title are fundamentally self-limiting, since they depend
on the marketing of a “name space” (artist/song pairs) that is
extrinsic to the file sharing service. To truly supplant the exist-
ing music distribution system, any replacement must develop
its own mechanisms for marketing and recommendation of
new music.
And in fact, we already see those mechanisms emerging. File
sharing services rely heavily on that most effective of market-
ing techniques: word of mouth. But over time, anyone who has
studied the evolution of previous media will see that searches
based on either pre-existing knowledge or word of mouth
represent only the low-hanging fruit. As the market matures,
paid marketing is added, and step by step, we build up the
same rich ecology of middlemen that characterizes existing
media marketplaces.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 75
New media have historically not replaced but rather aug-
mented and expanded existing media marketplaces, at least in
the short term. Opportunities exist to arbitrage between the
new distribution medium and the old, as, for instance, the rise
of file sharing networks has helped to fuel the trading of
records and CDs (unavailable through normal recording
industry channels) on eBay.
Over time, it may be that online music publishing services will
replace CDs and other physical distribution media, much as
recorded music relegated sheet music publishers to a niche
and, for many, made household pianos a nostalgic affectation
rather than the home entertainment center. But the role of the
artist and the music publisher will remain. The question then,
is not the death of book publishing, music publishing, or film
production, but rather one of who will be the publishers.
Lesson 6
“Free” is Eventually Replaced by
a Higher-Quality Paid Service.
A question for my readers: How many of you still get your
email via peer-to-peer UUCP dialups or the old “free” Internet,
and how many of you pay $19.95 a month or more to an ISP?
How many of you watch “free” television over the airwaves,
and how many of you pay $20-$60 a month for cable or satel-
lite television? (Not to mention continue to rent movies on
videotape and DVD, and purchasing physical copies of your
favorites.)
Services like Kazaa flourish in the absence of competitive
alternatives. I confidently predict that once the music industry
provides a service that provides access to all the same songs,
freedom from onerous copy-restriction, more accurate meta-
data and other added value, there will be hundreds of millions
of paying subscribers. That is, unless they wait too long, in
which case, Kazaa itself will start to offer (and charge for)
76 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
these advantages. (Or would, in the absence of legal chal-
lenges.) Much as AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, CNET, and many others
have collectively built a multibillion dollar media business on
the “free” Web, “publishers” will evolve on file sharing networks.
Why would you pay for a song that you could get for free? For
the same reason that you will buy a book that you could bor-
row from the public library or buy a DVD of a movie that you
could watch on television or rent for the weekend.
Convenience, ease-of-use, selection, ability to find what you
want, and for enthusiasts, the sheer pleasure of owning some-
thing you treasure.
The current experience of online file sharing services is
mediocre at best. Students and others with time on their hands
may find them adequate. But they leave much to be desired,
with redundant copies of uneven quality, intermittent avail-
ability of some works, incorrect identification of artist or song,
and many other quality problems.
Opponents may argue that the Web demonstrates precisely
what they are afraid of, that content on the Web is “free,” that
advertising is an insufficient revenue model for content
providers, and that subscription models have not been suc-
cessful. However, I will argue that the story is still unfinished.
Subscription sites are on the rise. Computer industry profes-
sionals can be seen as the “early adopters” in this market. For
example, O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online is growing at 30 per-
cent a month, and now represents a multimillion dollar rev-
enue stream for us and other participating publishers.
Most observers also seem to miss the point that the Internet is
already sold as a subscription service. All we’re working on is
the development of added-value premium services. What’s
more, there are already a few vertically-integrated ISPs
(notably AOL Time Warner) that provide “basic” connectivity
but own vast libraries of premium content.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 77
In looking at online content subscription services, analogies
with television are instructive. Free, advertiser-supported tele-
vision has largely been supplanted—or should I say supple-
mented (because the advertising remains)—by paid subscrip-
tions to cable TV. What’s more, revenue from “basic cable” has
been supplemented by various aggregated premium channels.
HBO, one of those channels, is now television’s most profitable
network. Meanwhile, over on the Internet, people pay their ISP
$19.95/month for the equivalent of “basic cable,” and an ideal
opportunity for a premium channel, a music download serv-
ice, has gone begging for lack of vision on the part of existing
music publishers.
Another lesson from television is that people prefer subscrip-
tions to pay-per-view, except for very special events. What’s
more, they prefer subscriptions to larger collections of content,
rather than single channels. So, people subscribe to “the movie
package,” “the sports package,” and so on. The recording
industry’s “per song” trial balloons may work, but I predict
that in the long term, an “all-you-can-eat” monthly subscrip-
tion service (perhaps segmented by musical genre) will prevail
in the marketplace.
Lesson 7
There’s More Than One Way To Do It.
A study of other media marketplaces shows, though, that there
is no single silver-bullet solution. A smart company maximizes
revenue through all its channels, realizing that its real oppor-
tunity comes when it serves the customer whom ultimately
pays its bills.
At O’Reilly, we’ve been experimenting with online distribution
of our books for years. We know that we must offer a com-
pelling online alternative before someone else does. As the
78 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Hawaiian proverb says, “No one promised us tomorrow.”
Competition with free alternatives forces us to explore new dis-
tribution media and new forms of publishing.
In addition to the Safari subscription service mentioned
above, we publish an extensive network of advertising-sup-
ported “free” information sites as the O’Reilly Network
(www.oreillynet.com). We have published a number of books
under “open publication licenses” where free redistribution is
explicitly allowed (www.oreilly.com/openbook). We do this for
several reasons: to build awareness of products that might
otherwise be ignored; to build brand loyalty among online
communities; or, sometimes, because a product can no longer
be economically sold in traditional channels, and we’d rather
make it available for free than have it completely disappear
from the market.
We have also published many of our books on CD-ROM, in a
format referred to as the CD Bookshelf, typically a collection
of a half dozen or so related books.
And of course, we continue to publish print books. The avail-
ability of free online copies is sometimes used to promote a
topic or author (as books such as The Cathedral & The Bazaar
or The Cluetrain Manifesto became bestsellers in print as a
result of the wide exposure it received online). We make avail-
able substantial portions of all of our books online, as a way
for potential readers to sample what they contain. We’ve even
found ways to integrate our books into the online help
system for software products, including Dreamweaver® and
Microsoft’s Visual Studio®.
Interestingly, some of our most successful print/online hybrids
have come about where we present the same material in dif-
ferent ways for the print and online contexts. For example,
much of the content of our bestselling book Programming Perl
(more than 600,000 copies in print) is available online as part
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 79
of the standard Perl documentation. But the entire package—
not to mention the convenience of a paper copy, and the aes-
thetic pleasure of the strongly branded packaging—is only
available in print. Multiple ways to present the same informa-
tion and the same product increase the overall size and rich-
ness of the market.
And that’s the ultimate lesson. “Let the Wookiee win!” as
C3PO said so memorably in the first Star Wars movie. Let him
win in as many ways as you can find, at a fair price, and let
him choose which works best for him.
80 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Information Wants to
be Valuable
May 2001
Originally written for a Nature magazine series on the
impact of the Web on publishing, and still available at
www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/index.html. I argue
that the particulars of the publisher’s role certainly change when
works are published online, but the value of their work to both
authors and readers remains constant.
“Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to be
valuable.” I first heard this gem from Larry Wall, creator of the
Perl programming language. Like many other open source
software authors, from Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux®, to
Tim Berners-Lee and his spiritual descendants at the Apache
web server project, Larry discovered that one way to make his
information (i.e., his software) more valuable was to make it
free. Larry was thus able to increase its utility not only for
himself (because others who took it up made changes and
enhancements that he could use), but for everyone else who
uses it, because as software becomes more ubiquitous it can
be taken for granted as a foundation for further work. The
Internet (based on freely available software including TCP/IP,
BIND, Apache, sendmail, and so on) demonstrates clearly just
how much value can be created by the distribution of freely
available software.
81
Nonetheless, it is also clear that others, Bill Gates being the
paramount example, have found that the best way to make
their information valuable is to restrict access to it. No one
can question that Microsoft has created enormous value for
itself and its shareholders, and even its critics should admit
that Microsoft has been a key enabler of the ubiquitous per-
sonal computing on which so much of our modern business
world depends.
What many people fail to realize is that both Larry Wall and
Bill Gates have a great deal in common: as the creators (albeit
with a host of co-contributors) of a body of intellectual work,
they have made strategic decisions about how best to maxi-
mize its value. History has proven that each of their strategies
can work. The question, then, is one of goals, and of the strate-
gies to reach those goals. The question for publishers and other
middlemen who are not themselves the creators of the content
they distribute, is how best to serve those goals. Information
wants to be valuable. Publishers must focus on increasing the
value, both to its producers and to its consumers, of the infor-
mation they aggregate and distribute.
I am neither a practicing scientist nor a publisher of scientific
journals, but as a book and web publisher who works on a reg-
ular basis to document widely available “infrastructure” soft-
ware (both free and commercial), I am daily confronted with
decisions akin to those reflected in the debate now being car-
ried in these pages. Because I publish books about free soft-
ware, the people best qualified to write about it are often the
authors of the software. Like scientists, those authors often
have as their ideal the widest possible dissemination of their
software and information about how to use it, rather than the
greatest economic gain. They would like to see the documen-
tation they write distributed freely along with the software.
At other times, though, software authors see documentation as
an afterthought. They would rather not deal with it, and hope
that someone else will. In those cases, the question of com-
82 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
pensation often comes into play. Will a third party who is
motivated chiefly by money earn enough from this book to
justify the time writing it?
In helping authors to navigate this discussion, I try to bring
them back to their goal. Is it maximum dissemination of infor-
mation or is it earning enough to justify the work? I should
note that the jury is still out on whether making the text of a
book freely available helps or hurts sales of a print book.
There is evidence on both sides.
In some cases, such as Eric Raymond’s book, The Cathedral &
The Bazaar, free distribution of the content created the “buzz”
that allowed us to publish the same material successfully in
print. In other cases, such as our initial publication of the
Linux Network Administrator’s Guide, sales were reduced
because other companies republished some or all of the book
at lower cost, which they could do because they had no devel-
opment costs or royalties. However, over time this problem
abated, because the fact that those publishers were not adding
value was recognized by the target audience, and eventually
marginalized their products.
I see many parallels between the work of free software authors
and the work of scientists. In most cases, both are more inter-
ested in making sure their work is disseminated than in max-
imizing their return from it. In most cases, the target reader is
a peer of the author. Publishing is designed to enhance repu-
tation as well as to spread the word. Publishers must be care-
ful to keep prices fair, lest they be seen as taking advantage of
the goodwill of their authors, gouging the very customers who
also produce their content.
In this kind of environment, you have to ask about the role of
the publisher as middleman. No one who started as a self-
published author and gradually developed all the infrastruc-
ture of publishing (as I did) can question the enormous added
value that a publisher brings to the table. This value includes
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 83
editing (which starts with content filtering—the choice of
what to publish and what to refuse—and extends through
content development and quality control), manufacturing of
the physical product, marketing, sales, distribution, and col-
lecting and disbursing money.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the rhetoric was that
anyone could be a publisher. After all, with cheap, ubiquitous
web servers, the cost of printing and inventory was minimized.
There was a great deal of talk of “disintermediation.”
In a few short years, the reality has turned out otherwise. It is
quite easy to put up a web page, not so easy to discover it. The
fundamental job of publishing is precisely mediation: media-
tion between a huge class of potential authors, and an even
larger class of potential readers. Simple mathematics dictates
the rise of multi-tiered distribution chains, in which publish-
ers aggregate authors, various types of resellers aggregate read-
ers, and wholesalers aggregate publishers for resellers and
resellers for publishers. The same multitiered distribution has
emerged on the Web. Betting on this logic, my company
created the first Web portal, a site called GNN (Global
Network Navigator) in early 1993. We sold the site to AOL in
1995, and they later folded it into their main service, but the
vision of web aggregators (i.e., publishers) has unfolded pretty
much as I imagined it.
Many people with their own web pages end up writing for bet-
ter-established web sites; those sites are further aggregated for
readers by search engines, directories, and other portals such
as Google, Yahoo! or AOL. In fact, web publishers now employ
full-time workers to ensure that their pages are listed on these
gateway sites, much as publishers of printed books employ
sales people. A large proportion of Internet advertising has come
from web sites trying to get better visibility for their product.
84 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
However, the Web does bring another wrinkle: the ability of
groups to self-aggregate. The core functions of publishing,
from content filtering to audience aggregation, can be per-
formed by a group of interested users. This is particularly true
when there is already a well-defined target community. This
can be a disruptive force in the publishing marketplace. So, for
example, sites such as Cnet and ZDnet spent tens of millions
of dollars building and promoting portals for technical infor-
mation on the Web, while two college students built a site
called Slashdot (“News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.”) into a
similarly powerful market presence simply by inviting their
readers to submit, organize, and comment on their own content.
Interestingly enough, though, as Slashdot has grown in popu-
larity and evolved into a real business, it has needed to add
more editorial staff to filter the submissions of a growing mar-
ketplace of readers who now recognize that exposure via
Slashdot is a powerful marketing tool. In short, even a com-
munity-centric effort ends up recreating some of the funda-
mental dynamics of publisher as middleman and aggregator.
What this evolution illustrates is that publishers will not go
away, but that they cannot be complacent. Publishers must
serve the values of both authors and readers. If they try to
enforce an artificial scarcity, charge prices that are too high or
otherwise violate the norms of their target community, they
will encourage that community to self-organize, or new
competitors will emerge who are better attuned to the values
of the community.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 85
Beyond the Book
April 2000
At the 2000 Waterside Publishing Conference, I was invited to
speak on a panel called “Beyond the Book.” The conference is
aimed at an audience of computer book authors, editors, and
publishers. The organizers were no doubt expecting a few words
on what O’Reilly Media is doing with eBooks, with the online
sites we publish, like xml.com, and with our technical confer-
ences. But instead, what I spoke about was why O’Reilly has
always reached beyond the book in all of our publishing efforts.
This article is a summary of what I tried to say.
Most publishers think that their business is to create products
that people want, and that accordingly transfer dollars from
consumers’ pockets to their own. At O’Reilly, we believe that
the core of our business is to transfer knowledge from people
who have it to people who need it. Yes, we are in business to
make money, but this is a kind of housekeeping, not the pur-
pose of the business.
I like to compare business (or life for that matter) to an
extended road trip. Say you want to travel America by the back
roads. You need gas for your car, food and water for your body.
Especially before heading across Death Valley or the Utah salt
flats, you’d better be darn sure that you have enough gas in
your tank. But you certainly don’t think of your trip as a tour
of gas stations! What’s the real purpose behind what you do?
86
Why then do so many companies think that they are just in
the business of making money? At O’Reilly, our products aren’t
just books, conferences, and web sites: they are tools for con-
veying critical information to people who are changing the
world. Our product is also the lives of the people who work for
us, the customers who are changed as a result of interacting
with us, and all the “downstream effects” of what we do.
When I started the company, my stated business goal was a
simple one: “Interesting work for interesting people.” Above
all, we wanted to be useful. Our financial goals were just to
keep afloat while doing something worthwhile.
We started our business life as a technical writing consulting
company. Between paying jobs, we thought we could perhaps
create some value by documenting Unix programs that didn’t
have a manual. We wrote books like Learning the vi Editor, sed
& awk, and UNIX in a Nutshell not because we thought there
was a huge market waiting to be tapped, but because we used
these programs, had learned about them, and thought we
might as well put our skills to use passing on what we knew.
Our first print runs for the earliest of these books were only a
few hundred copies. No other publisher touched these topics
because they thought the market was too small. We didn’t
know enough to have such an opinion. All we knew was that
people were using this software, and there wasn’t much good
documentation. And because we thought the subject matter
was important, we kept promoting the books, rather than
dropping them and going on to look for greener pastures. As it
turned out, each of the books I mentioned went on to sell hun-
dreds of thousands of copies.
Once we realized the possibilities for financial success in pub-
lishing, we tried not to forget our roots. Instead of pursuing the
“hot” topics of the day, we kept trying to document software
that we found interesting and useful. One of those things was
the Internet, which was just emerging from academia into
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 87
wider use. Our book, The Whole Internet User’s Guide &
Catalog, published in 1992, ended up having profound impact.
It sold over a million copies, introduced many people to the
Internet for the first time, and was a key factor in the explosive
growth of the early commercial Internet.
One of the topics we covered in that book was the World Wide
Web. We didn’t choose to cover the Web because our market-
ing department told us there was great demand for informa-
tion about it! There wasn’t. At the time we published the book,
there was a total of 200 web sites. But we knew the Web was
an important technology and we wanted to spread the word.
Once again, simply trying to do something worthwhile was
the cornerstone of a great success.
It was at this time that we stumbled on an incredibly power-
ful approach to marketing. We had recently hired Brian Erwin,
the former director of activism for the Sierra Club, to head our
PR efforts. Brian helped us to realize that we shouldn’t be pro-
moting our products. He showed us how much more powerful
it was to talk about the technologies themselves, the possibili-
ties that they might unleash, or the threats to the future that
we might encounter. He reminded us that in marketing, as well
as in product development, the best way to have an impact
was to be useful.
We sent copies of The Whole Internet User’s Guide to every
member of Congress, and launched a massive PR campaign
about the Internet. We’ll never know how much impact our
evangelization of the Net, and most particularly the World
Wide Web, really had. After all, as they say, success has a thou-
sand fathers. But we’ve heard, for example, that the NCSA team
that developed the Mosaic web browser (predecessor to
Netscape Navigator®) first learned of the Web from an
O’Reilly direct mail piece. We also created the first web portal,
a site called GNN (Global Network Navigator). GNN was the
first advertising-supported web site (started in early 1993), and
88 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
was a prototype for sites such as Yahoo!, HotWired, and many
other early web sites. While GNN vanished into oblivion after
we sold it to AOL in 1995, its influence on the early Web was
immeasurable.
In those early years of the Web, there weren’t any venture cap-
italists looking for the big win. We invested millions of our
own dollars in GNN, despite being a very small company at
the time, and spent a lot of time trying to persuade big pub-
lishing companies that the Web was going to be important.
Their narrow, bottom-line focus made them miss the biggest
opportunity in any of their lifetimes. Those opportunities
went to newcomers.
Our next big success was with what is now called open source
software. We had published a book called Programming Perl in
1991. At the time, Perl was an obscure programming language
with an enthusiastic following among Unix system adminis-
trators. As the Web took off, it became the dominant language
for building dynamic web sites. Sales of the book exploded,
and the second edition was one of the most successful com-
puter books of 1996.
But something bothered me. Despite the evidence of its impor-
tance, Perl got virtually no notice in computer trade publica-
tions. There was no marketing budget, no PR agency, and so
the press ignored Perl despite its grassroots success. We decided
to spread the word. We organized a Perl Conference in 1997
not because we realized what a huge opportunity the techni-
cal conference business would turn out to be for us, but
because we felt that the Perl language and the Perl community
needed a voice, and a place to gather.
The success of the first Perl Conference got me thinking, and
the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there were
many technologies, like Perl, that were created as “free soft-
ware,” but which didn’t get noticed by the mainstream. I knew
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 89
from the success of the books like DNS and Bind, Apache: The
Definitive Guide, sendmail, and Running Linux that they cov-
ered important technologies. What’s more, these technologies
had something unusual in common: they had all been devel-
oped not by commercial vendors, but by an idealistic network
of independent developers.
I decided to organize a “summit meeting” of key free software
developers, including Linus Torvalds (the Linux kernel), Larry
Wall (Perl), Brian Behlendorf (a cofounder of the Apache
group), Paul Vixie (BIND—the software behind the Internet’s
domain name system), Eric Allman (sendmail, the Internet’s
dominant email server), plus Eric Raymond, whose ground-
breaking paper “The Cathedral & The Bazaar” had inspired
Netscape to commit to releasing the source code for its next
generation of web browsing software. The meeting also
included people associated with the FreeBSD operating system
and the Free Software Foundation’s GNU project.
It was at that summit that the group formally decided to
endorse the term “open source software” instead of “free soft-
ware,” which had negative connotations for corporate
America. But most importantly, we were able to get across a
story to the press, that much of the software behind the
Internet, as well as the emergent Linux operating system, had
come from an unrecognized wellspring of creativity, from peo-
ple who were solving problems not for commercial gain, but
because they loved what they were doing. These people wrote
software to solve their own problems; they gave it away
because they thought it might be useful to someone else. Their
brilliance and their generosity was changing the world.
Most of you know what has followed. Within a few months,
Linus Torvalds was on the cover of Forbes, with Larry Wall,
Brian Behlendorf, and the Free Software Foundation’s Richard
Stallman featured inside. Linux has taken off. And the idea,
which seemed so novel at the time, that the Internet was built
90 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
on open source software, that programs like Apache, Perl,
MySQL, BIND, and sendmail, are important far out of propor-
tion to their nonexistent marketing budgets, is now wide-
spread. And of course, sales of O’Reilly’s books on these topics
have soared. Once again, we’d scored a marketing coup not by
promoting our products, but by promoting big ideas.
My recent well-publicized tussle with Amazon.com over their
1-Click and Associates patents springs from the same roots. I
worried that publically taking my biggest reseller to task
might hurt my business, but it had become clear to me that the
importance of the issue outweighed considerations of profit
and loss. As it turns out, my efforts have strengthened the rela-
tionship between O’Reilly and Amazon.com, and Jeff Bezos
has joined me in my campaign for reform of the software
patent system.
In short, O’Reilly has become one of the pre-eminent com-
puter book publishers not by “following the money,” but by
following the trail of value. We publish books about topics
that seem important, and they succeed because they fill a real
need. We base our marketing and PR campaigns not on flash,
but on substance.
A similar approach to thinking “beyond the book” is behind
our other publishing ventures. I was once asked by an invest-
ment banker why my brother James and I had started
Travelers’ Tales, when the travel book market is so much less
lucrative than the computer book market. We did it because
we saw a problem: tourism is becoming the world’s largest
industry. It can be a soulless industry, one that treats the world
as a theme park, with a list of attractions to be sampled, or it
can be a thoughtful one that celebrates differences and
rewards attention to the inner life of the traveler.
Travelers’ Tales has won over 50 awards, including (three
times) best travel book of the year from the Society of
American Travel Writers. Like many O’Reilly efforts, it’s also
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 91
spawned a host of imitation series from other publishers. It’s a
thriving publishing company whose sales are growing at 20%
a year. But that’s not what we’re about. We’re about changing
the world, helping people get more out of their travels, and
destinations more out of their visitors.
Why did we go into consumer health publishing? Because
where is there greater “information pain” than when someone
is hit with a life-threatening disease? Our Patient Centered
Guides provide information from “health system hackers”—
patient advocates who have experienced the best and worst of
what the medical system has to offer, and who want to pass
along their experience for sufferers of chronic or life-changing
diseases. We’re not just in this business to make a dollar; we’re
in it to make the world a better place. We look to make money
so we can do more of what’s important.
But my point isn’t to brag about O’Reilly’s accomplishments in
publishing or beyond it, though I am certainly proud of them.
I am trying instead to urge each of you to think yourselves
beyond the book. I want you to think why the technologies
you cover are important, and how you can help to tell their
story. Focus on making a difference, not on making a dollar,
and I’ll lay odds you’ll make both.
Publishing is part of a noble tradition. It was born out of the
same wellsprings as our great university system, out of the
spirit of inquiry that brought us modern science. As authors,
editors, and publishers, you are not just cogs in a money
machine. You are scribes, capturing knowledge that might oth-
erwise be lost; you are teachers, passing on knowledge that
might otherwise go unheeded.
In short, I am here to tell you that what exists beyond the book
is a world where you can make a difference.
92 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Buy Where
You Shop
May 2003
Most issues aren’t black-and-white, though it’s often easier to fall
into thinking of them in that way than to wrestle with subtleties
and consequences. In this piece, written for one of our catalogs,
I make the case that value is more than price, and that it’s in our
self-interest to support what we value.
Like all technology revolutions, the Internet is profoundly dis-
ruptive. For all its promise, it can destroy old ways of life
before we realize the value of what we’re losing. Part of the
process of integrating new technology is developing social
norms for its proper use. We have much to learn about how to
use the Internet properly—how to avoid abuses such as spam,
invasions of privacy, attempts by large corporations to control
how we use technology, and the like. But there’s also a more
humble area of disruption that I’d like to bring to your atten-
tion. Let me start with a story.
A few months ago, I was talking with one of my most loyal
retail customers, a specialty computer bookstore in
Massachusetts. “We survived the chains, and we survived
Amazon,” he said, “but I don’t know if we’re going to survive
the online discounters. People come in here all the time,
browse through the books on display, and then tell me as they
leave that they can get a better price online.”
93
Now, you might say, as the Hawaiian proverb notes, no one
promised us tomorrow. Businesses, like individuals and
species, must adapt or die. And if the Internet is bad for small,
local retailers, it’s good for the online resellers and it’s good for
customers, right?
But think a little more deeply, and you realize that my friend
wasn’t complaining that people were buying books elsewhere.
He was complaining that people were taking a service from
him—browsing the books in his store—and then buying else-
where. There’s a world of difference between those two state-
ments. Online shopping is terrific: you can get detailed prod-
uct information, recommendations from other customers,
make a choice, and have the product delivered right to your
door. But if you aren’t satisfied with the online shopping expe-
rience, you want to look at the physical product, for example
browsing through a book in the store, you owe it to the retailer—
and to yourself—to buy it there, rather than going home and
saving a few dollars by ordering it online.
Think about it for a minute: the retailer pays rent, orders and
stocks the product, pays salespeople. You take advantage of all
those services, and then give your money to someone else who
can give you a better price because they don’t incur the cost of
those services you just used. Not only is this unfair; it’s short-
sighted, because it will only be so long before that retailer closes
his or her doors, and you can no longer make use of those
services you enjoy.
If you like shopping in bookstores, remember this: many inde-
pendent booksellers are on the ropes. (One store owner we
know resorts to ordering books on personal credit cards when
she is put on credit hold by publishers because she can’t pay
her bills.) Even in the chains, computer book sections are in
danger of shrinking in favor of other sections where sales are
more robust. If you value the bookstore experience, my advice
is this: buy where you shop. I buy lots of books online. I read
94 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
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. Don’t just look for the best price. Look for the
best value. And if that value, for you, includes the ability to
page through a book, support your local bookseller.
This story is the tip of an iceberg, of course. As with the unin-
tended consequences of previous revolutions (pollution from
automobiles and industrialization, for instance), it takes a
strenuous forethought to make sure we don’t inadvertently
damage parts of our world that we take for granted. It’s easy to
get fired up about large technical, social, and political issues,
but the future we create is even more the result of small deci-
sions we make every day.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 95
On Business
and Life
Rules of Thumb
In the late 80s, I wrote a draft of an employee handbook called
Rules of Thumb that was never distributed. An employment
lawyer I sent it to for review told me, “It’s the most inspiring
employee handbook I’ve ever read, but I can’t let you use it.” I
struggled with it for years, before giving in and letting the
lawyers rewrite it. A watered down version was finally distrib-
uted to employees in the year 2000! This Introduction, from the
earliest draft I could still find, dates from the summer of 1992.
What the Company Is All About
No one should ever be unemployed, and no one should ever
be stuck with a job that they hate. There are so many worth-
while things to do, and it is possible for a creative, hard-work-
ing individual to make a living doing just about anything.
However, it is often hard to find a point of attack, and the
risks of starting your own business are high. Many more
opportunities are available to a larger organization with some
financial strength than are available to an individual. What’s
more, so many important things are the product of organized
activity—people working together cooperatively to achieve
something that no one could manage alone.
Ultimately, that’s one of the reasons why I founded O’Reilly,
and what interests me most about it: it is a way for me, and
those working with me, to have more choice about the things
98
we work on, and how and when we work, without living in a
garret. My goal is to build a platform that increasingly sup-
ports freedom for employees to demonstrate their initiative
and creativity, at the same time as it gives us the ability to tackle
larger and more interesting projects.
I don’t think of O’Reilly as a publishing company. I see it rather
as a point of leverage between the skills and interests of its
employees, and opportunities for applying those skills out in
the world. Right now, because of our history, those opportuni-
ties are chiefly in publishing, but that need not always be the
case. I hope to branch out increasingly into other areas, led by
employee interests, and as we can make those areas work as self-
sustaining businesses. New ventures can start from either end:
1. Here’s an opportunity. Who can take the ball and run
with it?
2. So and so is interested in thus and such. How can we
make a profit at it?
Season these alternatives with a dash of realism, and you have
my corporate vision.
As a new employee (or even one who has been around for a
while), it is very important to keep this in mind, because it
shapes company strategy and policy in many ways that are not
immediately obvious. Probably the most important is that
profit is not the most important company goal. Profitability is
desirable like good health is desirable in your personal life:
without it, nothing else goes well. But in any given case, max-
imum profitability might be sacrificed to the development of
employee potential, the pursuit of worthwhile goals, keeping
the company a place where people enjoy coming to work each
day, the freedom of employees to find their own balance
between work and personal life, or some other intangible. My
worst fear is that we would become a “professionally man-
aged” company with our eye only on the bottom line.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 99
If I were to boil my company vision down to one sentence, it
would be this: “To make money doing interesting and worth-
while things.”
Why “to make money”? Well, money is the fuel for the whole
system. It makes the rest possible. What’s more, there is a won-
derful rigor in free-market economics. When you have to prove
the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for
them, it cleans out an awful lot of wooly thinking. I think
often of Alexander Pope’s comment about writing poetry in
rhymed couplets. He said that funnelling his creativity
through such a narrow aperture made it shoot out like water
from a fountain.
Why “interesting and worthwhile”? Oddly enough, while dull
people find very little to be of interest, intelligent people find
almost anything interesting. (Curiosity is the wellspring of
intelligence.) And so there are many things that can be inter-
esting that do not add a great deal of value to the world.
Adding the proviso that what we do be worthwhile in some
larger sense limits our selections a bit, but like the need to
make money, actually improves the chances of happiness at
what we do.
A key point to remember is that the company is a means, not
an end. The end is a better life for those of us who work, for
our customers, and (as far as we can stretch it) for everyone
we touch.
100 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Fishing with
Strawberries
A brief article I wrote for O’Reilly’s internal company newsletter
in early 1995.
Recently, several of us were talking with an investment banker
with whom we’ve been having some exploratory talks about
finding strategic partners that want to figure out how to play
this new Internet game.
The investment banker made a statement that really struck
me, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw in it, both
to agree and disagree with.
The statement was this: “You don’t fish with strawberries.
Even if that’s what you like, fish like worms, so that’s what
you use.”
He was referring specifically to finding out what the real
needs of the potential strategic partners might be, since they
might be focussing on something other than what we think is
most important about what we have to offer.
That’s really good advice for any sales situation: understand
the customer and his or her needs, and make sure that you’re
answering those needs. No one could argue with such sound,
commonsense advice.
At the same time, a small voice within me said with a mixture
of dismay, wonder, and dawning delight: “But that’s just what
we’ve always done: gone fishing with strawberries. We’ve
101
made a business by offering our customers what we ourselves
want. And it’s worked!”
On one level, the difference between the two points of view is
simply the difference between selling one on one to a very tar-
geted prospect and selling to a mass market, where you are
casting a wide net, and some set of potential customers will
match your own “strawberry” profile.
But there’s perhaps a deeper level on which this difference is
one on which a great deal that is special about this company
hinges. We seek to find what is true in ourselves, and use it to
resonate with whatever subject we explore, trusting that reso-
nance to lead us to kindred spirits out in the world, and them
to us.
I like to think that we have the capability to fish with worms
when necessary, but that in general, we’re farmers, not fisher-
men, and strawberries go over just fine.
102 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Some Necessary
Qualities
I wrote this for our in-house newsletter in December, 1993, as
I realized that we were starting to move from a company in
which everyone knew each other and culture was based on
personal relationships to one in which our values needed to
be institutionalized.
As we approach the end of 1993, we’re possibly facing a greater
rate of change than we did when we first came to publishing in
1985, or when I moved half the company to California in 1989.
With so much happening, we need all the best in ourselves
that we’ve brought to the business so far, plus a lot of new
strengths as well.
Creativity . . . Well, some people might say we perhaps have
too much of that, and need to add a pinch more restraint. But
in times when new projects seem to be bursting out of every
corner, creativity may serve not just to start more things to
overwhelm us, but instead to guide us in the next level of inte-
gration. The last thing we want to do is to rigidify in order to
contain and manage the genies we’ve unleashed. We simply
need to turn our creativity to new purposes.
Courage . . . We’ve broken a lot of comfortable molds in the
last year. For example, we’ve broken out of the familiar
X/Unix market where we’re well known and well thought of
for a much wider market where we can no longer assume that
customers know very much about us. This puts us back in a
position where we have to really reach out to sell, and can’t
103
just sit back and wait for people to come to us. This can be
uncomfortable—it’s a different level of cold calling—but is
essential for a business that’s growing and not just resting on
its laurels. Each of us who has customer contact now has to
carry the whole message of the company and what it’s about,
rather than just coasting on what everybody already knows
about us.
Curiosity . . . To me, this has always been the foundation of the
company’s strength, the quality that makes us look for inter-
esting projects rather than just ones that we are already con-
vinced will be successful. The desire to learn new things and
solve new problems and then to share what we’ve learned has
got to remain at the top of our list.
Kindness and caring . . . What do they have to do with busi-
ness? Everything! Especially as the pace and the pressure pick
up, we have to keep on trying to be good to each other, to our
suppliers, and to our customers. What good does it do us to be
successful by all the usual business indicators if what we are
creating is unhappiness?
Foresight and good judgement . . . I think that we’ve always
had a certain kind of strategic thinking that’s helped us to pick
good markets and topics, and to be in the right place at the
right time. However, we need to find out how to apply our
vision to ourselves and not just to the outside world. What
kind of organization do we need to have to grow into our
next stage?
I could go on and list all the usual virtues, because after all, the
same things that make the foundation of a good life make the
foundation of a good business.
Still, there are specific challenges, and the biggest one is how
to institutionalize the qualities that have up to now been car-
ried for the organization by us as individuals. Especially as the
pace of growth picks up, it’s increasingly easy for a company to
be defined solely by its commercial goals.
104 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
It’s becoming clear that the company is going to keep growing,
and to be around for many years to come. If that’s the case, one
of our major challenges is to find a way to build company
structures that support our underlying goals and values, to
create a truly moral organization that is as effective as it is
good, and will stay that way a hundred years from now, when
all of us are gone.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 105
Ten Years as a
Publisher
A short piece I wrote for one of our catalogs in late 1996, reflect-
ing on why we got into publishing in the first place. Our business
has changed significantly since then, as has the marketplace, but
there’s a thread of the perspective I express below that continues
to run through the work we do.
O’Reilly & Associates began almost eighteen years ago now, as
a technical writing consulting company, but it was ten years
ago this past October that we made the shift to publishing
our own books: 100 copies each of Learning the UNIX
Operating System and Reading and Writing Termcap Entries
stapled and in plain brown covers, went on sale at UNIX Expo
in New York.
In celebrating our tenth anniversary as a publisher, I want to
reflect on what brought us to publishing in the first place,
what made us different from most other computer book pub-
lishers, and what I hope will continue to make us different
through our next ten years, or twenty, or a hundred.
We had no grand plans for bestsellers, no sense even of where
the technical book market was going or what the sales possi-
bilities were. We were technical writers; our job was docu-
menting things that needed explaining. In the cracks, when we
weren’t busy writing manuals for hire, we decided to docu-
ment some of the great free software that no one else was pay-
ing attention to.
106
The opportunity that drove us was not the opportunity to
make our fortune (though certainly we hoped to keep the roof
over our heads) but the opportunity to exercise our skills
while filling a real need.
Over the years, we’ve tried to follow that same principle in
selecting topics: if a book doesn’t fill a real need, let’s not spend
time on it. This attitude tends to take us away from the main-
stream, into areas other publishers are ignoring. So, when
everyone else was doing DOS books, we did Unix and X.
When Windows applications were hot, we did the Internet.
Now that the Internet is suddenly the central focus of just
about every technical publisher, what are we going to do next?
To be completely honest, I don’t know the answer myself. The
computer industry is in transition, with old paradigms and
platforms crumbling and new ones jostling for the right to
take their place. There are many clear needs, but also many
candidates eager to fill them; things will have to stabilize
before it’s clear what users are having persistent trouble with.
All of this is perhaps a roundabout explanation of why certain
seemingly obvious books don’t appear in our catalog. Rather
than rush out shallow, overlapping titles, we wait for the dust
to settle, for the holes in the “obvious” to become apparent,
and for a knowledge base to accumulate that is sufficient for
us to publish books of enduring value.
In the meantime, we’re continuing to work on filling in the
blanks in the undocumented areas we’ve already identified.
One consequence of writing books that meet real needs
instead of following quick-buck fashions is that you stick with
them. That’s why we’re still selling those first two books ten
years later, when just about every other Unix book of their
generation is long out of print. Reading and Writing Termcap
Entries (now Termcap and Terminfo) is on its last legs, to be
sure, as the technology it describes has largely become obso-
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 107
lete along with the alphanumeric terminals it supported, but
Learning the UNIX Operating System has become a perennial
bestseller, as have dozens of the books that followed it in the
Nutshell Handbook series.
We’re going to continue doing books on Unix as long as there’s
life in the “old geezer.” We’ve documented most of the old core
programs, but new software is being written and coming into
common use all the time. Even though the Internet is no
longer solely a Unix phenomenon, it has sprung from the
same freewheeling creativity and supports a rich ecology of
free and commercial software—much of it poorly documented.
But when it really comes down to it, if you want to know
where we’re going, don’t look for obvious buzzwords or books
on the latest hot topic. Instead, look for unsolved problems,
like how to make online publishing work as a business, or how
to make web publishing (not just web browsing) a desktop
tool as widely distributed as email. (Those are the problems
that led us to launch GNN and WebSite, respectively.)
In short, we’re out there trying to gain the experience that
will allow us to write the next generation of books you’ll
be looking for: books about how to create and manage com-
plex information products running on heterogeneous,
distributed platforms.
I believe Joseph Campbell once said that the story of King
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table was the quintes-
sential myth of Western civilization. The knights seek out not
the high road to success but the deepest, darkest part of the
forest, where there are enemies to fight and people in distress.
It may seem more than a little pretentious to compare writing
technical books to slaying dragons, especially when there are
still so many real dragons and ogres abroad in our society. But
at the same time, we each play out myths like this where we are.
108 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
And the dark forest that we walked into ten years ago, largely
by a series of chances, mischances, and small inspirations, was
the forest of “information pain.” We don’t slay dragons. We
write books. But we write books that are needed, and we take
the time to do them well, so that we’ll still be selling them as
long as they are needed.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 109
Knowing When
to Let Go
A piece I wrote for our internal company newsletter in November
of 1992, in response to mounting stress at the company as we
became more and more successful.
As I hear mounting tales of overwhelm—too much to do, too
many things going right—from customer service, from mar-
keting, from production, from editorial, (from my own psy-
che!), I am impelled to give a bit of contrarian advice.
When you feel yourself starting to clutch, to worry that you
can’t keep up, let go! There are times when the conscious mind
can’t keep up, but the unconscious will do just fine. The fal-
tering steps of a newcomer to a dance become assured to the
extent that she is able to forget the individual steps and yield
to the music. The straining load of an engine getting up to
speed gives way to a smooth hum as it slides into gear. I seem
to remember (or did I make this up?) a wonderful martial arts
book or movie in which an old master “bumbles” his way
through a room, accidentally disposing of each of his highly
trained opponents with strokes that might be luck but are
more likely the highest level of skill guided by complete
reliance on intuition. What I’m saying is meant in no way to
diminish the huge increase in workload many of us are facing
as a result of the company’s success. This is perhaps most
striking in customer service, where they went from about
3800 orders in September to nearly 7200 in October—very
close to a doubling of the normal workload. Such increases
require urgent practical steps to keep things from going haywire.
110
Nonetheless, I’ll stick to my point: the conscious mind some-
times gets in the way, worrying about how to fit everything in.
Periodically, I find myself about to explode, as I reach some
kind of inner limit to how many things I can keep track of. If
I’m lucky, a certain kind of letting go, a certain kind of sur-
render or forgetting what I know (and remembering the power
of what I don’t know!) blasts it all into insignificance.
I find myself somehow deciding that I can’t keep up, and trust-
ing my unconscious (or the hidden power of my spirit) to help
me find my priorities. And often, I find that as soon as I do let
go in this way, I find myself powering through the same tasks
that before seemed insurmountable.
An old friend of mine used to refer to this as “jet” vs. “piston”
functioning. A piston engine is overloaded at speeds that are
hardly enough to engage a jet.
I also find that sometimes some of the things I was worrying
about just aren’t that important. In that Rules of Thumb hand-
book I keep promising to finish, I quote a wonderful passage
from Lao Tzu. He’s cataloging some of the qualities that are
attributed to a wise man, and adds:
And this one also:‘Roiled as a torrent.’
Why roiled as a torrent?
Because when a man is in turmoil how shall he find peace
Save by staying patient till the stream clears?
How can a man’s life keep its course
If he will not let it flow?
What I’m trying to say here is that we don’t need always to be
in control, but rather, to be good at responding to change, to
have the wisdom to know when to act, and when to wait “till
the stream clears.”
I know that this article is already burdened with analogies, but
let me close with one more. When bodysurfing (and in many
other sports), you succeed by harmonizing yourself with forces
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 111
that are more powerful than you are, rather than by trying to
force them to your will. That’s the kind of attitude I’m trying
to urge on you now—not passivity, but rather an active
surrender that finds the exact right moment and the center of
the wave.
112 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Walking the
Kerry Way
My contribution to Travelers’ Tales Ireland, published in
March, 2000.
I hadn’t spent much time with my brother Frank since he was
about twelve years old, back in 1973. That was the year I’d got-
ten engaged to a non-Catholic, and my parents wouldn’t let
me bring her home because “it would scandalize the chil-
dren.” I was nineteen and equally sure of myself, so I refused
to come home without her.
I finally gave in seven years later, when my father’s health was
failing, and went home for a visit alone. After that, my parents
also relented, and met my wife and three-year-old daughter
for the first time. Our mutual stubbornness had cost us pre-
cious time together as a family, a loss made especially
poignant by my father’s death six months later.
My relationship with my younger brother and sisters took
years to recover. By the time I came home after my long exile,
Frank was away at college, and thereafter we’d met mainly at
family holidays and reunions. Still, we’d found many common
interests and a mutual admiration. Both of us were entrepre-
neurs—I in publishing, he in construction—and both of us
had struggled with how to build a business with a heart, a
business that served its employees as well as its customers. In
many ways, our lives were mirror images, seven years apart.
113
But there was one big crack in the mirror, one gulf between us
that we skirted politely (most of the time): while I had long
ago left the church, Frank remained a committed Catholic. He
had also retained an abiding love for Ireland, to which he had
returned again and again with my father, mother, and sisters in
the years when I was persona non grata. He and my father had
gone for many a tramp around Killarney, the town where my
father was born, and where my aunt still lives. Mangerton,
Torc, and the McGillicuddy Reeks were more than names to
Frank; hikes on the slopes of these mountains were the source
of the richest memories of his childhood and young adulthood.
I envied Frank the time he’d spent in Ireland with my father,
and I’d always wanted to spend more time there myself. When
my mother suggested that Frank and I might want to walk
part of the Kerry Way together (a higher altitude walking ver-
sion of the Ring of Kerry), we both jumped at the chance. I had
a week between a talk I was due to give in Rome and another
in London. It was March—not the best time to visit Ireland—
but Frank could get free, and with his eighth child on the way,
it was now or never.
We set out from Killarney on a blustery day. Though neither
of us had done much recent hiking, we had an ambitious itin-
erary, about eighteen miles a day for the next five days. We
were planning on staying each night at bed & breakfasts along
the way, but we still carried packs with plenty of extra clothes.
The first day took us through Killarney National Park, up
around the back of Torc, then down across the road to Moll’s
Gap and into the Black Valley. The hike took more out of us
than we expected, and we tottered the last few miles, grateful
that our guest house was at the near end of “town” (a sprin-
kling of houses spread over the better part of a mile).
After a hearty dinner of local lamb chops, though, things
began to look up, so when Frank confessed that it was his
wife’s birthday, and that he wanted to go a mile up the road to
114 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
the valley’s only public phone, outside the youth hostel and
the church, to call her, I agreed to go along. It was pitch dark
by then, and raining to boot. We managed to stick to the road,
though, and eventually came to the phone. Unfortunately,
Angelique was not at home. How about going in to say a
rosary for her, he asked?
Now, I hadn’t said the rosary for over twenty years, and wasn’t
sure I even remembered how the “Hail Mary” went, but I agreed.
The church was open, of course, its outer door swinging in the
wind. In Ireland, at least in the back country, the church is
never closed. There was no electricity, and only a single candle
burning by the altar. The wind howled outside, the door
banged open and shut. We began to pray.
Frank helped me recall the words; the memories I’d never lost.
When we were small, the rosary, even more than dinner (where
my mother never sat down till everyone else had eaten), was
the time the family was all together. As we droned aloud
through the decades, the joyful, the glorious, and the sorrow-
ful mysteries, I remembered my father’s passing.
He had had a heart attack. He knew himself to be a dead man,
he said. He was met by Mary, St. Joseph, and surprisingly, the
devil. He begged for more time to make his peace with his fam-
ily, and his wish was granted. The doctors brought him back,
and as he lay in the hospital, intubated and unable to speak,
he was desperate to communicate with each of us, scrawling
on a small white slate. He wanted to reply to my letter, he said.
I had written him a few weeks before, telling him that even
though I had left the church, I had absorbed so much of him,
his belief, his moral values, his desire to be good, and to do
good. I didn’t want him to think he had failed. His short, so
poignant reply, written on a slate and soon erased, but burned
forever in my memory: “God forgive me, a sinner.” His apology
for the long years we had not spent together: “I only wanted
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 115
you to be with us in paradise.” The desire for togetherness in a
world to come had become a wedge between us.
As he recovered over the next few days, he was a different man.
He had always embodied for me so much of the stern, dog-
matic side of Catholicism. Now, in the face of death, all that
was stripped away, and the inner core of spirituality was
revealed. His passion for his God was the heart of his life. How
could I have never seen it before? So many of us build a shell
around who we really are; our inner world is as untouchable
as the heart of an oyster, till forces greater than we are pry us
apart. Now, all was exposed. “I never showed you the face of
Christ when you were small,” he told my brother James. Well,
he showed it to us then. It’s as if he’d been turned inside out,
and all the love and spiritual longing that had been hidden by
his shyness and his formality were shining out like the sun.
Three weeks later, the time he had asked for was up. He had
another attack, and this time he went for good.
We had taken him back to Ireland to bury him. It was a mag-
ical day, early April but beautiful as only a spring day in
Ireland can be beautiful, a day of radiance stolen from the
gloom. The funeral mass in the cathedral was concelebrated
by thirty or forty priests: his two brothers, his childhood
friends, and many others come to honor the life of one of
Killarney’s dear sons now coming home for good. (He had
himself studied for the priesthood before deciding to pursue
family life instead; his brothers Frank and Seumas had
become senior in two of Ireland’s great orders of priests, the
Franciscans and the Columbans.)
He was buried in a Franciscan robe. He had long been a mem-
ber of “the little order of Saint Francis,” a lay organization
devoted to Franciscan ideals. We learned then of small
penances he would do, like tying rough twine around his waist
under his clothes. As if it were still the Middle Ages! I would
116 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
have scoffed, but I’d seen the light shining through him when
impending death had pried all his coverings away.
Afterwards, the four sons, Sean, James, Frank, and I, walked
behind the hearse up the main street of the town. As the funeral
procession passed, those walking in the opposite direction
turned and took “the three steps of mercy,” walking with the
procession. The depths of Ireland’s Catholic legacy was never
so clear as when a group of loutish youths, who might have
been a street gang anywhere else, bowed their heads and
turned to take the three steps with us.
As we turned up the road to Aghadoe cemetery, a breeze blew,
and the blossoms fell from the trees onto the coffin. If it had
been a movie, I would have laughed. It’s never that perfect!
Except it was.
The cemetery, crowned with the ruins of a sixth century
chapel, looks down on the lakes of Killarney. Ham-handed
farmers (my father’s schoolmates) helped us carry the coffin
over rough ground to the family plot. Normally, after the serv-
ice, we would have all left, and “the lads” would have filled in
the grave. But we wanted a last farewell, so we sent the lads on
their way, and Sean, James, Frank, and I filled in the grave.
Now, twenty-five years later, I was back in Ireland. My tired-
ness fell away. I was at the heart of my father’s mystery, the
place where he had turned his passionate heart to God, and
the place where he had wrapped it round with rituals that had
kept me from seeing its purity and its strength.
Somehow, Frank had seen through the ritual, had shared in it
and sunk his roots to the same deep place. I was honored that
he was opening the door for me as well. “Hail Mary, full of
grace, the Lord is with thee . . . ”
There are a thousand ways to God. Let us all honor the ways
that others have found.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 117
The next few days we wore our legs off, as the paths became
wilder. The worst of it was the aptly named Lack Road, which
our guidebook insisted had been used to drive cattle to mar-
ket “within living memory.” We couldn’t see how you could
drive a mountain goat herd across it now, as we picked our
way down an impossibly steep slope. We understood why our
aunt, who had worked in Kerry Mountain Rescue, had insisted
we pack so many extra clothes. Turn an ankle out here, and
you’re many hours from help, with changeable weather bring-
ing freezing rain at any moment. At one point, the trail, which
had us up to our knees in mud at many a point, vanished
beneath ten feet of water, only to reappear tantalizingly on the
other side, with no apparent way across. Ireland is a wilder
country than many people realize.
On the fourth day, we came round the crest of a hill and saw
the ocean spread out below us. Thirty or forty miles back the
other way, we could see the gleaming lakes of Killarney, and
amazingly enough, the green below Aghadoe. We could see
many of the passes we’d picked our way through over the last
few days, the miles that had lent soreness to our feet.
Along the way, we had talked through much of the old pain of
the lost years, we’d shared dreams of the present and the
future, but as we went on, we’d mostly fallen into a friendly
silence. The old magic of Ireland was driving our reflections
inward, recreating in us the unique Irish temper—passion and
wildness and boggy depths alternating with conviviality, and
ending up in quietness—a mirror of the landscape and the
changing weather.
118 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Books That Have
Shaped My Thinking
June 2004
In The Meaning of Culture, John Cowper Powys makes the
point that the difference between education and culture is that
culture is the incorporation of music, art, literature, and philoso-
phy not just into your library or your CV but into who you are.
He talks too about the interplay of culture and life, the way that
what we read can enrich what we experience, and what we
experience can enrich what we read.
To make his point, I always like to cite an experience I had when
I was fourteen, and had just read The Golden Warrior, Hope
Muntz’s classic novel of Harold, last of the Saxon kings.
Harold’s story fired my imagination, particularly the idea of the
compact between a leader and his people, the compact that led
Harold to march south to face William the Conqueror at
Hastings, despite having just repelled an invasion by his half
brother Tostig and his Viking allies up in Yorkshire. Advisors
urged him to wait, but William was raping and pillaging, and
Harold made a forced march to glorious defeat, keeping faith
with his subjects. While reading this stirring book, I was vaca-
tioning in the Lake District of England. We swam every day at
the swimming hole. But it wasn’t just any swimming hole. This
was the headwaters of the River Derwent, the river that ran red
with blood when Harold defeated the Viking invasion. Book and
place were together seared into my memory and sense of values,
119
each giving meaning and resonance to the other.
So there, I’ve told you about two books that made a huge impres-
sion on me. Sometimes, as with The Meaning of Culture, the
book is a part of my regular mental toolbox. And with others, as
with The Golden Warrior, there may only be a half remembered
concept from decades ago. Here are a few of the books that have
played a large role in my life:
The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching), translated
by Witter Bynner. My personal religious philosophy, stressing
the rightness of what is, if only we can accept it. Most people
who know me have heard me quote from this book. “Seeing
as how nothing is outside the vast, wide-meshed net of heaven,
who is there to say just how it is cast?”
The Palm at the End of the Mind, by Wallace Stevens. Stevens is
my favorite poet, and this is the most commonly available col-
lection of his poems. His meditations on the relationship of
language and reality have entranced me for more than thirty
years. I keep reading the same poems, and finding more and
more in them. Also someone I quote often. Special favorites are
“Sunday Morning,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,”
and “Esthetique du Mal.” From the last of these:
One might have thought of sight, but who could think
of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what one sees and hears and out
of what one feels, who could have thought to make
so many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
as if the air, the mid-day air, were swarming
with the metaphysical changes that occur,
merely in living as and where we live.
Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson. Johnson, author of the first
major dictionary of the English language, is one of my heroes.
120 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
His work can be considered an extended meditation on
Milton’s phrase from Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place,
and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” The
quote from Johnson I subject people to most often is from his
short novel Rasselas, in which a character remarks something
like this: “I consider the pyramids to be a monument to the
insufficiency of all human enjoyments. He who has built for
use till use is supplied must begin to build for vanity.” The pyr-
amids are actually quite a wonderful thing, but there’s a lot of
wisdom in this analysis. Johnson’s work is a wonderful
reminder that our minds have prodigious energy that must be
focused on the right objects, and that much human pathology
comes from having insufficient objects for our striving.
In that regard, I always like to quote from Rilke’s poem “The
Man Watching,” which I encountered in Robert Bly’s collec-
tion of Rilke translations. The concluding passage, which talks
about Jacob wrestling with the angel, losing, but coming away
strengthened from the fight, goes something like this: “What
we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small.
What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively
greater things.” (I’ve gone back and checked, and that’s not an
accurate rendition of Bly’s translation, but it is the way I retell
the advice to myself and my friends.)
Colin Wilson’s The Outsider is another book that addresses the
same theme: the untapped power of the mind and its constant
battle with the world, to make sense of it, or be broken by it.
But the book is also significant for me because at 23, reading
this book, I wanted to write something as good as Wilson had
done at that age. (For a wonderful story recapitulating
Wilson’s ideas, I also recommend his takeoff on H.P. Lovecraft,
The Mind Parasites.) Wilson also shaped my relationship to
books. So many critics write about literature and philosophy
as a dead thing, an artifact. Wilson writes about it as a conver-
sation with another mind about what is true.
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 121
An Introduction to Realistic Philosophy, by John Wild. The
book that introduced me to the profundity of Aristotle. Virtue
is the control of the appetites by right reason, the formation of
good habits, or as my brother James once summarized it,
“Virtue is knowing what you really want.” It was reading this
book during high school that convinced me that philosophy
was meant to be used, a guide to a better life, not a dry subject
rehearsing the thoughts of dead men.
Science and Sanity, by Alfred Korzybski. Okay, General
Semantics was the 30s equivalent of pop-psychology in the
70s, but there are some great concepts there. “The map is not
the territory.” The idea is that people get stuck in concepts and
don’t go back to observation. My friend George Simon applied
General Semantics to psychology, and gave me a grounding in
how to see people, and to acknowledge what I saw, that is the
bedrock of my personal philosophy to this day. There are many
popular introductions to General Semantics on the market,
and also a fun science-fiction book, A.E. van Vogt’s The World
of Null-A.
Rissa Kerguelen, by F.M. Busby. A science-fiction book I read at
about the time I was starting my company, and that influenced
me deeply. One key idea is the role of entrepreneurship as a
“subversive force.” In a world dominated by large companies,
it is the smaller companies that keep freedom alive, with eco-
nomics at least one of the battlegrounds. This book gave me
the courage to submerge myself in the details of a fundamen-
tally trivial business (technical writing) and to let go of my ear-
lier hopes of writing deep books that would change the world.
Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright. A utopian novel written in
the 1930s, about an imaginary country where technology has
not yet hastened the pace of life, and where people find time
to nurture relationships and the land they live on. Also a novel
of “the long view.” My first Sun workstation was named isla,
and the fantasy of living on the land was a part of my move to
122 | Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Sebastopol. Physical labor is a wonderful antidote to the life of
the mind.
The Lymond Chronicles, by Dorothy Dunnett. I discovered this
series of six difficult, complex historical novels about a char-
acter roving the world at the turn of the seventeenth century
as my company was passing the critical 50-person inflection
point. Lymond is a brilliant leader who isn’t afraid of the
opprobrium of his peers—he does the right thing, seeing fur-
ther than those around him. He was a hero I aspired to emu-
late. The books are also just darn cool—the amount of histor-
ical scholarship packed into these stories is truly remarkable.
Dune, by Frank Herbert. When I got this book out of the
library at age 12, my father remarked, “It’s sinful that so large a
book should be devoted to science fiction.” Little was he to
know that this book, full of wonderful concepts about how to
come to grips with a world out of our control, would play so
large a role in his son’s life. After I graduated from college, a
friend who was editing a series of critical monographs about
science fiction asked me if I’d like to write a book about Frank
Herbert. I agreed, and it was that choice that set me on the
path to becoming a writer. My first book, Frank Herbert, is
online at tim.oreilly.com/sci-fi/herbert. In the course of writing
the book, I got far deeper into Herbert’s ideas than I had read-
ing his books growing up. The core message of all Herbert’s
work is that we can’t control the future, but we can control our
response to it, surfing the edge of change and risk.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn
introduced the term “paradigm shift” to describe the
changeover from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy. But the
book is far more than a classic in the history of science. It’s also
a book that emphasizes how what we already believe shapes
what we see, what we allow ourselves to think. I’ve always
tried to separate seeing itself from the stories I tell myself
about what I see. Pattern recognition is impeded if you are try-
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell | 123
ing to overlay an existing pattern on the facts rather than let-
ting the facts sit quietly until they tell their own story. That’s
General Semantics again.
As you can see, there are no books about technology or busi-
ness on that core list! A lot of literature and philosophy
instead. I apply myself to computers, social issues, and busi-
ness with a toolset developed in another world. But that’s not
to say that there are no books about science and technology
that haven’t had a profound influence on me. Here are a few:
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, by Larry Lessig. One of
my all-time favorite quotes is Edwin Schlossberg’s “The skill of
writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”
This book gave me a whole new set of tools for thinking about
the complex interplay between four forces: government laws
and regulations, social norms, technology, and markets. Lessig
makes a simple but profound case that you can’t think of tech-
nical issues in isolation from their legal and cultural context.
The Unix Programming Environment, by Brian Kernighan and
Rob Pike. In addition to its articulation of the Unix tools phi-
losophy that is so dear to my heart, the writing is a model of
clarity and elegance. As a technical writer, I aspired to be as
transparent as Kernighan.
On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. I wouldn’t say this book
influenced me, since my principles of writing were established
long before I read it. However, it does capture many things that
I believe about effective writing.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a business book cover to cover, but
here are a few whose concepts have struck a chord or given me
a vocabulary that helps me to see things in a new way or just
to give context to my own ideas:
The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen. An analysis
of why great companies fail, because innovation often requires
throwing out everything that has made you successful in the
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past. Disruptive technologies are often born on the fringes, in
markets where worse is better.
Built to Last, by James Collins and Jerry Porras. The idea here
is that great companies aren’t afraid to have strong values. In
fact, their cult-like values are what make them stand out from
the norm.
Positioning, and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, by Al
Ries and Jack Trout. Anyone who wants to start a business
with impact needs to read these books.
Building a personal culture out of what you read and see and
hear doesn’t just end with books. I find moments in movies, in
songs, and in pop culture that have also become part of my
personal vocabulary for seeing and responding to the world.
So, for example, in the mostly forgotten movie Joe Versus the
Volcano, there is a scene in which Joe, played by Tom Hanks,
is dying of thirst on a raft after a shipwreck. He sees the moon-
rise, and says, “Oh my god, I forgot!” and has his faith in life
renewed by the sight. So often, I see something special that
returns me to myself, and I think of those words.
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