O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established 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 ...

that

publishes Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

books, produces tech conferences, and provides an

online learning Educational technology (commonly abbreviated as edutech, or edtech) is the combined use of computer hardware, software, and educational theory and practice to facilitate learning. When referred to with its abbreviation, edtech, it often refer ...

platform. Its distinctive brand features a

woodcut Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas tha ...

of an animal on many of its book covers.

Company

Early days

The company began in 1978 as a private consulting firm doing

technical writing Technical writing is writing or drafting technical communication used in technical and occupational fields, such as computer hardware and software, architecture, engineering, chemistry, aeronautics, robotics, finance, medical, consumer electronics, ...

, based in the

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...

, Massachusetts area. In 1984, it began to retain publishing rights on manuals created for

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser 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, an ...

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 written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the ...

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 displayi ...

, when they launched one of the first Web-based resources, Global Network Navigator. GNN was sold to AOL in 1995, in one of the first large transactions of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

. GNN was the first site on the World Wide Web to feature paid advertising.

Conferences

In March 2020, O'Reilly announced they would be closing the live conferences arm of their business. Although O'Reilly Media got its start in publishing, roughly two decades after its genesis the company expanded into event production. In 1997, O'Reilly launched The Perl Conference to cross-promote its books on the

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

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 Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

summit, the meeting became known as the

Open Source Summit Open Source Summit (formerly LinuxCon) is a name for a series of annual conventions organized each year since 2009 by the Linux Foundation. The first LinuxCon took place in North America. Linux Foundation started organizing similar events in Eur ...

. The

O'Reilly Open Source Convention The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) was an American annual convention for the discussion of free and open-source software. It was organized by publisher O'Reilly Media and was held each summer, mostly in Portland, Oregon, from 1999 ...

(which includes the Perl conference) is now 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 O'Reilly ( ga, Ó Raghallaigh) is a group of families, ultimately all of Irish Gaelic origin, who 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 a ...

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." Today, the company offers a variety o
conferences
including: * Strata Data Conference * OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) * Velocity Conference * Artificial Intelligence Conference *TensorFlow World * The O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference

Discontinued conferences

* O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (2001 as O'Reilly P2P Conference; 2002–2009) *Fluent * Tools of Change (TOC) Conference (2007–2013) *The Next:Economy Summit *The Next:Money Summit *The Solid Conference *The O'Reilly Design Conference * Web 2.0 Summit (co-produced with TechWeb) * Web 2.0 Expo (co-produced with TechWeb) * MySQL Conference and Expo (co-presented by

MySQL AB MySQL AB was a Swedish software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well as ...

, until 2008, then by Sun Microsystems since 2009, now by Oracle Corporation since 2010.) * RailsConf (co-presented by

Ruby Central Ruby Central, Inc., is a non-profit organization based in the United States, dedicated to support and advocacy for the Ruby programming language. Ruby Central is the parent organization of the annual International Ruby and Ruby on Rails Conferenc ...

) * 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 CollabNet VersionOne is a software firm headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, United States. CollabNet VersionOne products and services belong to the industry categories of value stream management, devops, agile management, application lifecyc ...

O'Reilly Online Learning (formerly Safari Books Online)

In 2001, O'Reilly launched

Safari Books Online A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an import ...

, a subscription-based service providing access to ebooks 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 Peachpit is a publisher of books focused on graphic design, web design, and development. Peachpit's parent company is Pearson Education, which owns additional educational media brands including Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, and New Riders. F ...

Alpha Books Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Random House, is an American publisher best known for its Complete Idiot's Guides series. It began as a division of Macmillan. Pearson Education acquired Macmillan General Reference from Simon & Schuster in 1999 ...

Cisco Press Cisco Press is a publishing alliance between Cisco Systems and Pearson, the world's largest education publishing and technology company which is part of Pearson PLC, the global publisher and co-owner (47%) of Penguin Group and formerly Financia ...

, FT Press,

Microsoft Press Microsoft Press is the publishing arm of Microsoft, usually releasing books dealing with various current Microsoft technologies. Microsoft Press' first introduced books were ''The Apple Macintosh Book'' by Cary Lu and ''Exploring the IBM PCjr H ...

, New Riders Publishing,

Packt Packt is a publishing company founded in 2003 headquartered in Birmingham, UK,with offices in Mumbai, India. Packt primarily publishes print and electronic books and videos relating to information technology, including programming, web de ...

Peachpit Press Peachpit is a publisher of books focused on graphic design, web design, and development. Peachpit's parent company is Pearson Education, which owns additional educational media brands including Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, and New Riders. Fo ...

, Prentice Hall,

Prentice Hall PTR Prentice Hall was an American major educational publisher owned by Savvas Learning Company. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market, and distributes its technical titles through the Safari B ...

, Que and

Sams Publishing Sams Publishing is dedicated to the publishing of technical training manuals and is an imprint of Pearson plc, the global publishing and education company. Sams Publishing was founded in 1946 by Howard W. Sams, originally producing radio schem ...

. 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 The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, O'Reilly's corporate goal was to reignite enthusiasm in the computer industry. To do this,

Dale Dougherty Dale Dougherty (born 1956) is a co-founder of O'Reilly Media, along with Tim O'Reilly. While not at the company in its earliest stages as a technical documentation consulting company, Dale was instrumental in the development of O'Reilly's publish ...

and

decided to use the term "

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

" 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,” 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 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 San Mateo ( ; ) is a city in San Mateo County, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula. About 20 miles (32 km) south of San Francisco, the city borders Burlingame to the north, Hillsborough to the west, San Francisco Bay and Foster C ...

, 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.

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' 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 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, educatio ...

, it is still quite restrictive compared with other, widely used, licenses offered by Creative Commons.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:O'Reilly Media 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