Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reillyis the founder of O'Reilly Media. He popularized the terms open source and Web 2.0...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth6 June 1954
CountryIreland
across
Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.
people
People don't care about books. They care about ideas.
creative customers filter good leads predictor streak technology tried ways
I find that creative streak I think often leads in programmers to be good predictors of where culture as a whole is going to go. And that is where I think I've tried over the years to in some ways use my customers as a filter or a predictor of where technology as a whole is going to go. Or where the world as a whole is going to go.
change enamored google nature phones using
Everybody's enamored of the iPhone, the Google phone. But the applications are going to change. You know, we're going to start using our phones for shopping. It's going to change the nature of advertising.
companies moves somewhere
If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.
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A short, glorious life in service of a greater good - say, the life of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the pilots in the Battle of Britain, of whom Winston Churchill said 'Never have so many owed so much to so few,' - that is worth praising. But for glory alone? I think not.
apply changing code culture energy government great teaching technology work
A lot of my energy is going to Code for America, Jen Pahlka's non-profit startup. We're doing a lot of great work teaching government how to apply technology and changing the culture of government.
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A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.
ancient brings cannot glory greeks lives tears ultimately
While the willingness of the ancient Greeks to sacrifice their lives for glory brings tears to my eyes, I cannot ultimately condone the choice of Achilles.
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You grow great crops in great soil. And the soil is the commons. Increasingly, we have monopolistic companies that try to take as much as they can for themselves. And we have a patent and copyright regime that makes sure that nothing goes back into the commons unless by an extraordinary act of generosity. This is not fertile soil for innovation.
believer business capture create looking obligation people power religion silicon valley value
The thing we should all be looking for are people who want to make a difference. I'm a big believer in the Silicon Valley religion of the power of markets. But I also believe in our obligation to give back, and to give back in the way we do business, to create more value than we capture for ourselves.
advertising people saw
We were the first people to do advertising on the Web. I actually saw in 1993 that the ad could be the content, the destination.
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This whole idea of visibility by the public creates a pretty powerful lever. In the new transparency era, you are able to make change you would otherwise have difficulty making. It's no longer possible for somebody just to bury the problem. It's the reason why things like WikiLeaks are important.
bad choice eventually
I like to think that even if we make some really bad choices and go down some bad paths, we'll eventually emerge from it.