O'Reilly Media - Company

Company

The company began in 1978 as a private consulting firm doing technical writing, based in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. In 1984, it began to retain publishing rights on manuals created for Unix 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 manuals attracted significant attention, the company began increasing production of manuals and books

In 1992, O'Reilly Media published one of the first popular books about the Internet, Ed Krol's Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog. O'Reilly Media also created the first web portal, the Global Network Navigator ("GNN") in 1993; it was sold to AOL in 1995, one of the first large transactions of the dot-com bubble.

O'Reilly launched a Perl Conference to raise the profile of the Perl programming language. Many of the company's other software bestsellers were also on topics that were off the radar 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) is now one of O'Reilly's flagship events. Other key events include the Emerging Technology Conference and FOO Camp.

Besides publishing, the company hosts many annual conferences, and provides online services for the open source community. Among such conferences are O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in California and O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Overall, O'Reilly describes its business not as publishing or conferences, but as "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators." O'Reilly has also adopted Creative Commons's Founders Copyright, which limits the maximum term of copyright protection to 28 years; it is much shorter than the current default duration of the monopoly in copyright law.

Dale Dougherty, O'Reilly Media vice president, created the phrase "Web 2.0" during a brainstorming session during 2003. This then became the name for the Web 2.0 Summit run by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb (formerly CMP Media). They 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."

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.