Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly and Associates, the technology book publisher in Sebastopol, California that has been largely responsible for paving the roads to internet development and free software.

As an open-source developer since 1995, I personally owe a great deal to Tim’s company and its outstanding technical references.

One of my cherished tech mementos is an original printing of ‘Programming Perl’, signed by the authors.

Although Tim would never remember me, I’ve met him on at least two occasions and sat down for a meeting with him once. I’ve also been to his offices and met Perl author Larry Wall there, and watched Tom Christiansen moderate comp.lang.perl.misc over his shoulder there as well.

The place is legendary.

But only us open-source programmers can appreciate that kind of nostalgia, I guess.

Tim is also an active supporter of the free software and open source movements, and coined the term ‘Web 2.0′ (which was later misused by pretty much everyone).

In a guest post in Techcrunch, Tim sets his sights on Gov 2.0, and the hurdles involving the convergence of government and technology.

In the post, Tim, specifically mentions MTA’s case against StationStops for iPhone as the kind of approach which is holding progress back:

“Location is the key to the relevance of government to its citizenry, as well as to a host of non-governmental services. But there are already disputes about who owns the data. For example, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority issued a takedown order against the StationStops iPhone application. This is exactly the kind of bad policy that we hope to remedy by shedding light on best practices in government platform building.”

Read all about Tim’s ideas for Gov 2.0 in Techcrunch.