O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by
Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an
online learning platform. O'Reilly also
publishes books about programming and other technical content. Its distinctive brand features a
woodcut of an animal on many of its book covers. The company was known as a popular tech conference organizer for more than 20 years before closing the live conferences arm of its business.
Company
Early days
The company began in 1978 as a private consulting firm doing
technical writing, based in the
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...
, Massachusetts area. In 1984, it began to retain publishing rights on manuals created for
Unix
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
vendors. A few 70-page "Nutshell Handbooks" were well-received, but the focus remained on the consulting business until 1988. After a conference displaying O'Reilly's preliminary
Xlib
Xlib (also known as libX11) is an X Window System protocol client library (computer science), library written in the C (programming language), C programming language. It contains subroutine, functions for interacting with an X Server (computi ...
manuals attracted significant attention, the company began increasing production of manuals and books. The original cover art consisted of animal designs developed by Edie Freedman because she thought that Unix program names sounded like "weird animals".
Global Network Navigator
In 1993 O'Reilly Media created the first
web portal
A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...
, when they launched one of the first Web-based resources,
Global Network Navigator (GNN).
[ GNN was sold to AOL in 1995, in one of the first large transactions of the ]dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...
. GNN was the first site on the World Wide Web to feature paid advertising.
Conferences
From 1997 to 2020, O'Reilly was known for producing tech conferences focused on areas ranging from software architecture, AI, big data
Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...
, web development, design and more.
In March 2020, O'Reilly announced they would be closing the live conferences arm of their business.Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Perl was developed ...
programming language. Many of the company's other software bestsellers were also on topics that did not attract much attention of the commercial software industry. In 1998, O'Reilly invited many of the leaders of software projects to a meeting. Originally called the freeware summit, the meeting became known as the Open Source Summit. The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (which includes the Perl conference) was one of O'Reilly's flagship events. Other key events include the Strata Conference on big data, the Velocity Conference on Web Performance and Operations, and FOO Camp. Past events of note include the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and the Web 2.0 Summit. Overall, O'Reilly describes its business not as publishing or conferences, but as "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators."
Discontinued conferences
* Strata Data Conference
* OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention)
* Velocity Conference
* Artificial Intelligence Conference
* TensorFlow World
* The O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference
* O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (2001 as O'Reilly P2P Conference; 2002–2009)
* Fluent
* Tools of Change (TOC) Conference (2007–2013)Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...
in 2009, and by Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...
since 2010)
* RailsConf (co-presented by Ruby Central)
* Where 2.0
* Money:Tech
* Gov 2.0 Expo and Gov 2.0 Summit (co-produced with TechWeb)
* O'Reilly school of technology (discontinued as of January 6, 2016)
O'Reilly Network
In the late 1990s, O'Reilly founded the O'Reilly Network, which grew to include sites such as:
* LinuxDevCenter.com
* MacDevCenter.com
* WindowsDevCenter.com
* ONLamp.com
* O'Reilly Radar
In 2008 the company revised its online model and stopped publishing on several of its sites (including Codezoo and O'Reilly Connection). The company also produced dev2dev (a WebLogic-oriented site) in association with BEA and java.net (an open-source community for Java programmers) in association with Sun Microsystems and CollabNet.
O'Reilly Online Learning (formerly Safari Books Online)
In 2001, O'Reilly launched Safari Books Online, a subscription-based service providing access to ebook
An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. A ...
s and videos as a joint venture with the Pearson Technology Group. The platform includes content from O'Reilly and over 200 publishers including Adobe Press, Alpha Books, Cisco Press, FT Press
Financial Times Press in the United States and Financial Times Publishing in the United Kingdom are the book publishing imprints related to the ''Financial Times'' newspaper. The book imprints are owned by Pearson plc, a global publishing compan ...
, Microsoft Press
Microsoft Press is the publishing arm of Microsoft, usually releasing books dealing with various current Microsoft technologies. Microsoft Press' introduced books were ''The Apple Macintosh Book'' by Cary Lu and ''Exploring the IBM PCjr Home Comp ...
, New Riders Publishing, Packt, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall
Prentice Hall was a major American publishing#Textbook_publishing, educational publisher. It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth cen ...
, Prentice Hall PTR, Que and Sams Publishing.
In 2014, O'Reilly Media acquired Pearson's stake, making Safari Books Online a wholly owned subsidiary of O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly did a redesign of the site and had success in expanding beyond Safari's core B2C market into the B2B Enterprise market.
In 2017, O'Reilly Media announced they were no longer selling books online, including ebooks. Instead, everyone was encouraged to sign up for Safari or purchase books through online retailers such as Amazon.
In 2018, O'Reilly Media rebranded Safari to what is now O'Reilly online learning. The platform includes books, videos, live online training, O'Reilly conference videos, and more. In 2019, O'Reilly acquired Katacoda so users can experiment with code in the website itself.
Web 2.0 phrase
In 2003, after the dot com bust, O'Reilly's corporate goal was to reignite enthusiasm in the computer industry. To do this, Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly decided to use the term " Web 2.0" coined in January 1999 by Darcy DiNucci. The term was used for the Web 2.0 Summit run by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb (formerly CMP Media). CMP registered Web 2.0 as a Service Mark "for arranging and conducting live events, namely trade shows, expositions, business conferences and educational conferences in various fields of computers and information technology." Web 2.0 framed what distinguished the companies that survived the dot com bust from those that died, and identified key drivers of future success, including what is now called cloud computing
Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...
, big data, and new approaches to iterative, data-driven software development.
In May 2006 CMP Media learned of an impending event called the "Web 2.0 Half day conference". Concerned over their obligation to take reasonable means to enforce their trade and service marks, CMP sent a cease and desist
A cease and desist letter is a document sent by one party, often a business, to warn another party that they believe the other party is committing an unlawful act, such as copyright infringement, and that they will take legal action if the oth ...
letter to the non-profit Irish organizers of the event. This attempt to restrict through legal mechanisms the use of the term was criticized by some. The legal issue was resolved by O'Reilly's apologizing for the early and aggressive involvement of attorneys, rather than simply calling the organizers, and allowing them to use the service mark for this single event.
''Make:'' and ''Craft:''
In January 2005 the company launched '' Make:'' magazine and in 2006 it launched Maker Faire. The flagship Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, drew over 130,000 attendees. Other Faires around the world collectively draw millions. In 2012, O'Reilly Media spun out the Make properties into a separate venture-backed company, Maker Media, headed up by former O'Reilly executive and Make founder Dale Dougherty.
In the fall of 2006, O'Reilly added a second magazine, '' Craft:'', with the tagline "Transforming Traditional Crafts." ''Craft:'' folded in 2009.
In the summer of 2019, Maker Media laid off its entire staff and ceased operations.
Make Magazine is currently published by Make Community LLC.
Post–Tim O'Reilly era
In 2011, Tim O'Reilly stepped down from his day-to-day duties as O'Reilly Media CEO to focus his energy and attention on the Gov 2.0 movement. Since then, the company has been run by Laura Baldwin. Baldwin comes from a finance and consulting background.
Infinite Skills acquisition
In 2014 O'Reilly acquired Infinite Skills, a Canadian publisher of online and DVD video courses.
Licensing
O'Reilly uses Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
' Founders Copyright, which grants the company exclusive use of content produced by the authors who sign with them for 28 years. Although it is shorter than the current default duration of the monopoly in copyright law
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, e ...
, it is still quite restrictive compared with other, widely used, licenses offered by Creative Commons.
See also
* O'Reilly Media books
O'Reilly () is a common Irish surname. The O'Reillys were historically the kings of East Bréifne in what is today County Cavan. The clan were part of the Connachta's Uí Briúin Bréifne kindred and were closely related to the Ó Ruairc (O'Rou ...
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
Book publishing companies of the United States
Computer book publishing companies
Mass media companies of the United States
Entertainment companies based in California
Publishing companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Companies based in Sonoma County, California
Sebastopol, California
Publishing companies established in 1978
1978 establishments in California