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Tim O’Reilly

Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media, an author and interviewer exploring open source, AI, and how technology can create more opportunities for people.

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Tim’s happenings, collected from public sources, plus his backstory and Starbook, where fans write.

Known for

Overview

Work: Publisher, author, interviewer, and O’Reilly Media founder
Education: Studied classics at Harvard; graduated in 1975
Started: A technical writing consultancy in 1978
Known for: Open source advocacy, Web 2.0, and Foo Camp
Now exploring: Human expertise and the design of AI markets

Mini bio

How it started.

Tim’s route into publishing began with programming and the need for better manuals. In a Linux Journal interview, he traced his company to a technical writing consultancy started in 1978. Licensing manuals to Unix vendors gradually turned that consultancy into a publishing business.

Finding the next wave.

His company published The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog in 1992 and hosted an influential gathering of open source leaders in 1998. Tim helped bring the participatory web into focus through the Web 2.0 Conference and his 2005 essay “What Is Web 2.0,” which explained the web as a platform.

Making room for conversation.

Tim and Sara Winge developed Foo Camp, first held in 2003, as a gathering where attendees help create the program. His 2017 book WTF? combines memoir and business strategy with a call to use technology to tackle bigger human problems.

What he is asking now.

Through interviews, essays, and the AI Disclosures Project, which he cofounded with Ilan Strauss, Tim is exploring how AI markets can serve people. His recent conversations keep returning to a practical question: what can human expertise contribute as the tools become more capable?

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Quotes

Technology is the solution to human problems, and we won’t run out of work till we run out of problems.Tim O’Reilly, official WTF? book page

His call to use technology to do more, rather than only cut costs. Source: https://www.oreilly.com/tim/wtf-book

Trivia

His degree was in classics, rather than computer science.
Foo stands for Friends of O’Reilly; the gathering grew from Sara Winge’s idea for a “foo bar.”
He keeps an online archive partly because he has trouble keeping track of his own scattered writings and interviews.