Tim O'Reilly could have been a lot of things on the Internet. (The image is from the HollandSentinel.Com.)

He could have dominated it. A decade ago his Global Network Navigator was THE place to start every Internet session. Launched in 1993 it was the Web's first real home.

Of course, the Web outgrew it very quickly, and Tim had to decide where he wanted to fit into what would quickly become a whole new World. So he sold GNN to AOL, in 1995, and remained true to himself, as publisher of esoteric technology books with woodcuts of animals on their covers.

Since then, of course, O'Reilly & Associates has become an important brand for technical types who need a deep, honest understanding of a language, a protocol, or an Internet technology.

And O'Reilly himself has continued to speak out on things that interest him.

His latest involves the accelerating momentum toward open source, which has long been his passion. He calls it a "paradigm shift."

Now skeptics may treat O'Reilly and Linux much as Republicans treat Michael Moore and his movie. No matter. It's true O'Reilly is an advocate. But that doesn't make him wrong.

Besides, O'Reilly is as ready to skewer his open source development friends as Moore is to skewer John Kerry:

My premise is that free and open source developers are in much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to understand the consequences of the change, allowing others to reap the benefits.

O'Reilly's point is that we all use Linux, every day. Google runs Linux. Most big Web servers run Linux. The fact that your client is a Mac or PC doesn't mean you don't use Linux.

O'Reilly wants you to see three points:

• The commoditization of software
  
• Network-enabled collaboration
  
• Software customizability (software as a service)
  

While Linux is free, and under the GPL so is software written with the GNU license of Linux, sites like Google and Amazon that run on Linux remain fiercely proprietary. (Seen any Google or Amazon source code lately?) Even if you did have their source, you still couldn't replicate them, since they're databases, not applications.

They're services. And even though you can use both free, they both have many ways of extracting money from your wallet. Google sells ads, and versions of its database to run on your Intranet. Amazon sells stuff.

IBM figured this out years ago. It's how Lou Gerstner made the elephant tap dance. (That last is an Amazon link.)

Put this way it's all obvious. A site business model is more important than the software written for it.

O'Reilly writes differently than I do. I offer many discrete items, and if you follow along with each item you gradually learn along with me. O'Reilly prefers to edit his own work, again and again, revising and extending, until the essay here could really be a good thin book, should he choose to sell it that way. I have a reporter's instinct, he has an editor's instinct. Editors make more money.

Still, I note, I have to be true to myself, to how I work and what I do. It's far more important for me to be happy in my work, and happy in your enjoyment of it, than wealthy (although wealth would not be refused). Tim O'Reilly made a similar choice, albeit with a few more zeros attached to it. But just because he looks at seven-or-eight figure balance sheets, remember that, had he chosen not to be true to himself, these could easily have been ten-or-eleven figure sheets.

Makes my four-and-five figure sheets look like the same admirable self control.

So we have O'Reilly's Clue. Be happy with what you do, and your wealth will be sufficient to your needs.