Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution: DiBona, Chris, Ockman, Sam: 9781565925823: Amazon.com: Books (original) (raw)

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Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2013
It gives one a different perspective to read the essays of the people who are in the midst of the open source revolution, and making a huge difference in the way we live and think as regards the machines on which we depend for our daily routines, and understood so little for all that.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2013
Open Sources is a collection of essays related to Open Source development. It was published in 1999, which was a wonderfully interesting time in "open source land" as it had grown a lot in popularity and the question in the air was how much further will they be able to get. 14 years later, the answer is a lot further, yet not as far as people might have hoped and probably in very different directions. Anyways, most of the essays in this book are of historical significance as most essays reflect on one thread through the open source history together giving an interesting perspective on how it has developed.
After a brief introduction, Eric Raymond has the opening (and closing) essay. In the opening essay he looks at the history of 'hackerdom.' His essay feels strongly influenced by Steven Levy's delightful Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition. His closing essay talks about the open sourcing of Netscape, which is interesting as it has both been a success (I'm typing this in a Firefox browser) and a failure (Netscape is gone). But at the time the essay was written, it wasn't known yet how this would play out, making the speculation interesting.
The second essay is from Kirk McKusick about the history of the BSD unix distribution and how the different free BSD distributions got started and how they were related. The third essay is (unfortunately) short and is about how the Internet Engineering Task Force works. I wish they had found a better essay here as the history of the IETF is much broader than here described. The next essay is Richard Stallman, the last MIT hacker, about Free Software Foundation and GNU and building the GNU OS (where is it?). The essay of Stallman is quite political and strongly opinionated, which we ought to expect from RMS.
Next is Michael Tiemann, who is the founder of Cygnus Solutions and one of the main contributors to the gnu/gcc project. His company was one of the early Open Source companies and proved to the industry that you can build a company around Open Source. His company later merged with Red Hat (which isn't in the book). Next is Paul Vixie which IMHO could be left out. He describes "software engineering" as following a waterfall process. Next is Linus Torvalds who just contributed a very short essay about porting linux to different platforms.
Next. Robert Young, the founder of Red Hat to explain the business idea behind Red Hat. Next. Larry Wall, with a rather weird essay about... lines and circles. Next. Brian Behlendorf, one of the lead developers on Apache about different strategies for Open Source companies. Next. Bruce Perens, founder of the Open Source Initiative and creator of the Open Source Definition... talking about that. Next. Tim O'Reilly mumbling about the future of Open Source. Next. Some Netscape people about the Mozilla project. And than Eric Raymonds closing essay.
As you can see from the above line-up, it is quite amazing. Some essays are good, some are ok, some are bad... and some are excellent and insightful. That said, I find the book important as it gives so much different threads of how Open Source developed and how they were related. As a bonus in the book, the appendix contains a digested version of the Tanenbaum/Torvalds flame war on microkernels (which is a must read for anyone interested in OS or Linux history).
I very much enjoyed this book and would recommend it for anyone who is interested in history of open source or software development in general. If not, then you can better skip this book as it just talks about... the past :) The book isn't perfect as some essays are ... bad. Thus, 4 stars.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 1999
Format: Paperback
Why shell out the 20 Euro for this tome? Because it got submissions from some of the major figures from different corners of the scene that is described by some as free software and by some as open source world, depending on what position they take regarding to freedom and commercialization. Plus the time is right now, at a time when the mainstream industry started to embrace it, and to commercially use it. Time will tell if there will be a stable balance between commercial interests and those people who simply enjoy programming and like to share their results (like I do). To make it work, future affairs will have to be handled in a way that both sides gain - simply treating the Internet's volunteers as free of cost labour will face opposition and won't work as the 100% free gospel won't. (that's why I stick with the BSD camp)
I have to stop now and read more .. :-)

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2008
The essays are mostly a retelling of the history of open source software. I find it curious how much was written about Netscape, an enterprise that ultimately failed. With hindsight I would say that converting to open source is not a remedy for a poor business model. Poor, as used here, is not an absolute measure. Netscape was simply destroyed by a fierce competitor. Maybe the time was not yet ripe for open source software.
I found Tim O'Reily's concept of infoware to be very interesting. Today I would call them web applications as opposed to desktop applications not only because they are served from a web-server but also because they use the vast resources available on the web.
Brian Behlendorf comments on open source's position in the spectrum of software. It is interesting to see how this has changed over the past nine years. Initially open source was mainly infrastructure/back-end. While these areas are still predominant (LAMP), a lot of user software, specially CMS, is making a strong showing. Since these user systems are written mostly in interpreted languages like php, the question of open source, per se, becomes moot.
What is sorely missing is an economic theory of open source software. None of the authors seems familiar with the law of increasing returns which, according to Brain Arthur, is the economic law governing proprietary software. A discussion of this subject would help in developing sound business models for open source.
Although I'm not too satisfied with this book I'm ordering the sequel Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution
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Reviewed in Germany on March 12, 1999
Why shell out the 20 Euro for this tome? Because it got submissions from some of the major figures from different corners of the scene that is described by some as free software and by some as open source world, depending on what position they take regarding to freedom and commercialization. Plus the time is right now, at a time when the mainstream industry started to embrace it, and to commercially use it. Time will tell if there will be a stable balance between commercial interests and those people who simply enjoy programming and like to share their results (like I do). To make it work, future affairs will have to be handled in a way that both sides gain - simply treating the Internet's volunteers as free of cost labour will face opposition and won't work as the 100% free gospel won't. (that's why I stick with the BSD camp)
I have to stop now and read more .. :-)