Tim O'Brien

O'Brien is a frequent speaker, presenting talks on open source publishing, open source community, and the intersection of development and marketing at such conferences as O'Reilly Strata, Oracle's OpenWorld, ApacheCon, and the Open Source Bridge conference. He has worked as an enterprise architect for financial news providers including TheStreet.com and Forbes.com, and created information architectures and content models for product comparisons at ConsumerReports.com.

O'Brien has authored and contributed to several books for O'Reilly including the Jakarta Commons Cookbook, Harnessing Hibernate, Maven: A Developer's Notebook, and Maven: The Definitive Guide. Through his work in both the publishing industry and the open source community, O'Brien has advocated an “open book” approach to technical documentation that emphasizes audience participation and the free distribution of information over traditional approaches to “dead-tree” publishing. His views on open source books are captured in a quote, “Why limit yourself to selling 8,000 books to developers when you could have half a million unique readers?”