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Inspiring the future for more than 40 years
O’Reilly’s mission is to change the world by sharing the knowledge of innovators. For over 40 years, we’ve inspired companies and individuals to do new things—and do things better—by providing them with the skills and understanding that are necessary for success. At the heart of our business is a unique network of experts and innovators who share their knowledge through us. O’Reilly online learning offers exclusive live training, interactive learning, a certification experience, books, videos, and more, making it easier for our customers to develop the expertise they need to get ahead. And our books have been heralded for decades as the definitive place to learn about the technologies that are shaping the future. Everything we do is to help professionals from a variety of fields learn best practices and discover emerging trends that will shape the future of the tech industry.
Tim O’Reilly has a history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. If you’ve heard the term “open source software” or “Web 2.0,” he’s had a hand in framing each of those big ideas. He’s the founder, CEO, and chairman of O’Reilly.Editorial independence O’Reilly is committed to ensuring that everything produced under our name is congruent with our company values of openness, honesty, integrity, and neutrality. These values drive our approach to building information products.
History
Begun as a technical writing consulting firm, O’Reilly started publishing books about programming and computer technology in 1984. These books, known for the woodcuts of animals on the cover, became such a pervasive feature of the internet revolution that when, in 2000, the cover of Publisher’s Weekly declared, “The Internet Was Built with O’Reilly Books,” no one could take exception to the claim.
In 1992, O’Reilly published the first popular book about the internet, Ed Krol’s groundbreaking Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog, which helped to popularize the World Wide Web when there were fewer than 200 websites. O’Reilly went on to create the first commercial web portal in 1993, the Global Network Navigator (GNN). GNN was the first site on the World Wide Web to support advertising. GNN was sold to AOL in 1995, one of the first big transactions of the dot-com boom.
O’Reilly was long recognized for the conferences and summits it organized. In 1997, the firm launched the Perl Conference to raise the profile of the Perl programming language. Then, in 1998, realizing the need to tell a broader story about the role of free software in the internet economy, O’Reilly invited notable leaders of various free software projects to a meeting. At this gathering, the group formally agreed on a new term to tell their combined story—“open source software”—so the meeting became known as the Open Source Summit. The O’Reilly Open Source Convention, also known as OSCON (and which included the Perl Conference), was one of O’Reilly’s flagship events.