Knowledge Is Power
Smart Business, September 2000
by Thomas Claburn
You can thank Tim O'Reilly for all those classy computer-nerd books with line-art camels and gnus on the cover. But O'Reilly is more than a publisher. He's also a vocal member of the Net community and one of the most ardent supporters of the open source movement. "We realized the best way to market our products was to market the technologies they were about," he says. Still, O'Reilly is glad Linux fever has died down. "Open source is so much bigger than Linux," he says. Consider the open source programming language Perl, used everywhere from "Wall Street to Web infrastructure. . . . Open source is really about grassroots involvement in the development and direction of technology."
For O'Reilly, grassroots technology translates into lower barriers to entry and higher creative ferment. Contrast that with his dim view of Internet business-method patents. "I see the whole patent movement as an outgrowth of a different kind of hacking. The lawyers are hacking the computer industry, if you like. Just like programmers are always trying to figure out how to push the envelope. The problem is, 'lawyers' are pushing it into an area that has traditionally been pretty unregulated." So what about e-books? The publisher is wary because the market is immature. "Many of the systems being proposed for e-books are going to fail because they really don't assume there are multiple parties working together. . . . Publishers exist to aggregate authors for retailers. Retailers exist to aggregate customers for publishers. If it's one to one, you don't really have a business."
