As someone who’s had a lot of respect for O’Reilly, the person and the company, for a few years, and as someone who’s run small businesses and who knows how hard it is to take a vacation, I feel bad about this one. Because while you may not always agree with Tim, he’s not stupid, and an attempt to lock down the term “Web 2.0” at the same time as you’re building thought leadership around it, that’s stupid. So I’d urge the world to cut Mr. O’Reilly some slack till he gets back from vacation. I also suspect that the value of Web 2.0™ will be unimpaired; it’s really only used seriously by VCs and marketers and prognosticators who are by and large unperturbed by the lawyers’ view of intellectual property, not by the actual hands-on developers who build whatever it is we’re talking about; and for that, I still prefer read-write Web.
