Infoware is a term that was coined by

Tim O'Reilly Tim O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0. Education and early life Born in County Cork, Ireland, Tim O'Reilly moved to San Francisco, C ...

and is defined as a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wi ...

that use commoditized server software such as

LAMP Lamp, Lamps or LAMP may refer to: Lighting * Oil lamp, using an oil-based fuel source * Kerosene lamp, using kerosene as a fuel * Electric lamp, or light bulb, a replaceable component that produces light from electricity * Light fixture, or li ...

to enable data (e.g. book comments and ratings) to be shared via a

, and create a value as a result (e.g. other people's opinions of a particular book that you want to buy). The term infoware was first used in O'Reilly's talk on the subject at the

Linux Kongress The Linux Kongress was an annual conference of Linux developers from around the world, that took place every year from 1994 to 2010. It started as a two-day conference in 1994, when Linux was in the early stages of development, and by 2003 had becom ...

Würzburg Würzburg (; Main-Franconian: ) is a city in the region of Franconia in the north of the German state of Bavaria. Würzburg is the administrative seat of the ''Regierungsbezirk'' Lower Franconia. It spans the banks of the Main River. Würzburg ...

in 1997, and later in talks such as one at ISPCON 98. It was written up and published as his chapter ''Hardware, Software, and Infoware'' in the book '' Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution''. The term Infoware was in fact coined much earlier in 1981 by Hugh Gillespie and registered in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

in 1982 as the name of a Software development and consulting company focused on the delivery of simple information glue tools.

External links

''Hardware, Software, and Infoware''
chapter by Tim O'Reilly from ''Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution''
''Applying Distributed XML to The Open Source Paradigm Shift''
by Steve Mallett Websites {{Web-software-stub

See also

External links