O'Reilly Network Weblogs: Is O'Reilly a "free software business"?

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Is O'Reilly a "free software business"?

by Tim O'Reilly
Sep. 22, 2002

In a thread on the free software business mailing list, I responded to some discussion about whether or not O'Reilly was an "FSB" (Free Software Business). Rich Morin asked what was the difference between Red Hat shipping a software CD with a book in the box, and O'Reilly shipping a book with a software CD in the back. I responded, not so much to Rich as to some of the other elements in the thread, as follows:

Sorry to be responding late to this thread. I'll start out by saying that I don't consider myself "an FSB" if an FSB is a binary option. To me, FSB is not a description of a business's identity, but of some or all of its business practices, and some or all of its sources of revenue.

It does seem rather silly to me to say that Red Hat is an FSB because they redistribute free software as part of their business, while O'Reilly is not, because we don't distribute free software. RedHat make a great deal of their money from transactions that are only indirectly related to free software redistribution. I haven't studied their financial statements, but I don't see them redistributing the course materials for their training classes (which I understand form a very significant revenue stream for them), and I don't even know how they would redistribute the underlying value that lets them charge for service contracts and so on. Of course, free software is more a central part of Red Hat's ideology and business promise, and that makes sense to me.

But if FSB means, "free software ideology is a central tenet of the business," I'm even less an FSB. I believe strongly in both free software and proprietary software, in free information and in proprietary information. I'm always mindful of the remark I heard from Haridas Chaudhuri, a teacher of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, when I was a teenager. Someone asked him how he reconciled a belief in reincarnation with the discoveries of genetics, and he smiled and said, "Oh! You pick the hat to fit the head." That's a thought that should be kept handy in the mental toolchest! Anyone with a one-size-fits-all philosophy is doomed either to ill-fitting hats or going hatless into the storm, depending on what's available.

There are a wide range of strategies available for sharing the fruits of your mind, from free redistribution to managed scarcity. Which one you choose depends not only on your objectives, but on your tactics for achieving them. (For more on this subject, see the piece I wrote for Nature a few years back on what Bill Gates and Larry Wall have in common. Information Wants to Be Valuable.)

But back to the specifics of O'Reilly as an FSB.

My core mission is orthogonal to the free software/open source debate, but intensely informed by it. My vision at O'Reilly is that our business is about capturing the knowledge of early stage technical innovators and transferring it to the people who want to follow them. At heart, we're a knowledge transfer company.

As it turns out, many of the innovations in the technical industry have come from independent developers in a "research" setting, and some of our biggest opportunities have come from software like Unix and the Internet that were originally developed and spread without primary reference to the profit motive.

What drew us to those technologies was not their openness or lack thereof, but the fact that they were under-documented, that there was a vast body of shared knowledge among an early community that had no vehicle of transmission once the technology was aimed at a wider group. For example, I wrote what I believe was the world's first Unix system admin manual in 1983, when I asked the company I was contracting for the naīve question, "how are your customers going to learn about this root stuff?" I knew the way all of us at Masscomp learned it was by going and asking Tom Texeira, and I also knew that customers, at one remove, weren't going to have that option. (Incidentally, I later reacquired rights to that book, resold them to Multiflow, where Mike Loukides and later Aeleen Frisch expanded and rewrote it. When Multiflow went under, I acquired the rights to the expanded edition, and it eventually was published as Aeleen Frisch's Essential System Administration, which has taught hundreds of thousands of people how to do Unix system admin.)

Many of the grassroots technologies we document are free software (or started out as free software), many of them are proprietary, and many of them are in a gray area in between. Is HTML free software, for instance? (I've often argued that "view source" was one of the most important things about the web, and that it places a big part of the web pragmatically into the open source world, even if it's ignored by people who are obsessively focused on software licensing rather than on practical effects.)

Even when we document proprietary technologies, we're really documenting the collective knowledge of that technology's best users, not the knowledge of the technology's proprietary owner. We scour the net to find people who seem to know far more about the product than the average, and ask them to share their knowledge. And we try to expose the underbelly of the product, so that people will have as much as possible of the increased power over their software that's familiar to people in the Unix/free software world.

We are quite unashamedly willing to say, "our goal is the spread of useful human knowledge" rather than "our goal is the maximization of the spread of free software." And in many cases, free redistribution does not appear to us to be the best way of achieving our goal. In other cases it does. When considering the licenses for books, we sometimes release under free redistribution licenses if the authors ask us to do so and we think that the benefits of doing so are greater than the drawbacks. (See various articles collected at tim.oreilly.com/opensource where I've addressed the various elements of this equation over the years.)

In the end, I'd say that by the definition of at least the ideologically inclined in this group, O'Reilly is not an FSB. But I think we have a model that a lot of companies that you might consider FSBs, from Red Hat to Aladdin and SleepyCat, are also adopting. Like companies that started out hybrids, such as ActiveState and CollabNet, they are surfing the edge between free and proprietary in quest of a bigger goal.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to Foo Camps ("Friends of O'Reilly" Camps, which gave rise to the "un-conference" movement), O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. In addition to O'Reilly Media, Tim is a founder of Safari Books Online, a pioneering subscription service for accessing books online, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.