Recommendation

Excellent. An amazing book including a wide range of points of view on Open Source. If you are interested in open source at all, buy this book and read it.

Chapter Titles

• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Brief History of Hackerdom
• 3. Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable
• 4. The Internet Engineering Task Force
• 5. The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement
• 6. Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account
• 7. Software Engineering
• 8. The Linux Edge
• 9. Giving It Away: How Red Hat Software Stumbled Across a New Economic Model and Helped Improve an Industry
• 10. Diligence, Patience, and Humility
• 11. Open Source as a Business Strategy
• 12. The Open Source Definition
• 13. Hardware, Software, and Infoware
• 14. Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla
• 15. The Revenge of the Hackers
• A. The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate
• B. The Open Source Definition, Version 1.0
• C. Contributors

Note:

• For the titles and their authors on the same list, see "Open Sources" table of contents on the O'Reilly site. The list above was extracted from there, except that C. was added from the book itself.

[top]

Authors by Chapter

• 1. Chris DiBona, Sam Ochman, Mark Ochman (Linux)
• 2. Eric Raymond (hackers)
• 3. Marshall McKusick (BSD)
• 4. Scot Bradner (IETF)
• 5. Richard Stallman (GNU)
• 6. Michael Tiemann (Cygnus)
• 7. Paul Vixie (bind)
• 8. Linus Torvalds (Linux)
• 9. Robert Young (Red Hat)
• 10. Larry Wall (Perl)
• 11. Brian Behlendorf (Apache)
• 12. Bruce Perens (Debian)
• 13. Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly)
• 14. Jim Hamerly, Tom Paquin with Susan Walton (Mozilla)
• 15. Eric Raymond (hackers)

Notes:

• The authors of the Introductory first chapter are the editors for the book.
• In parentheses I include something associated with the author or authors.
• Appendix C contains a concise resume for each author.

[top]

What's a Hacker?

"Someone who loves to program and enjoys being clever about it."

Note:

• This definition is taken from Richard Stallman's writings in chapter 5 of the book (footnote #1).

From Left to Right

• free software
• extreme left: Richard Stallman
• middle left: Larry Wall
• middle right: Tim O'Reilly
• extreme right: Bill Gates
• proprietary software

Note:

• This is extracted from Larry Wall's writings in chapter 10, and hopefully not transmogrified.

[top]

Contents

• What's the Free Software Movement?
• What's the Open Source Revolution?
• About the Reviewer
• Many Points of View
• Recurring Themes

Note:

• I read and reviewed this book on-line using Safari.

Note:

• Published by O'Reilly.

What's the Free Software Movement?

To understand Open Source, it is important to first understand the Free Software Movement that it grew out of and what motivated that older movement.

definitions: The following is my understanding of the meaning of free software as put forward by The Free Software Foundation. I believe the descriptions I give will be adequate for this review, however, in case you wish to go deeper I've included two relevant links to the Free Software Foundation.

The free in free software has to do with it being unfettered rather than with it costing nothing.

Free software is software which is licensed in such a way that you may (without asking permission and without paying anything for doing so):

• run the program for whatever purpose you wish
• access the source code of the program
• improve the program
• redistribute the program

If you wish to go deeper, checkout The Free Software Definition.

But if we wish software to remain free, more is necessary. With this in mind, the Free Software Foundation encourages us to copyleft software.

Copyleft is a form of copyright that

• makes software free in the sense above and
• assures that all modified and extended versions of the software will also be free.

If you wish to go deeper, checkout What Is Copyleft?.

motivation: The primary motivation of the Free Software Movement is social. If software is free, then programmers are free to

• see the source for a program
• make fixes to what's broken
• share the fixed code freely.

In this way they can help their fellow programmers and users.

On the other hand if software is proprietary, then one is by the license generally prevented from doing any of these things. From the point of view of the Free Software Movement that is antisocial and unethical.

[top]

What's the Open Source Revolution?

Through time the Free Software Movement has come to be viewed as anti-business. This may to some extent be unfair, but it was and still is a widely held point of view. This was believed to be inhibiting the success of the Free Software Movement.

As a consequence a new movement was formulated using the phrase Open Source as its banner. Some of the differences from the older Free Software Movement are that the new movement

• is much more business friendly
• stresses the technological advantages of free or open software rather than the social advantages
• is more pragmatic and less judgmental in its views about which licenses are appropriate in particular cases

Depending on your point of view the difference is:

• a major shift in direction
• a small, though critical, course correction
• something in between

Generally, Open Source proponents see the Free Software Movement as a part of the Open Source Revolution. Richard Stallman, the most vocal advocate of Free Software, however, has not aligned himself with Open Source, mostly, I believe, because it does not make the social argument primary.

[top]

About the Reviewer

I am a supporter of both the Free Software Movement and the Open Source Revolution. I am really just beginning to learn much about them.

I have my domain hosted on a BSD system running Apache. Two other domains I'm the webmaster of are hosted on machines powered by Linux. The primary machine I use at home runs SuSE Linux (or perhaps I should say GNU/Linux). And the SuSE Linux distribution indeed contains many GNU products. (One that I use to great advantage is GIMP.) The main browser I use is Mozilla. My language of choice is Perl (which has been my favorite programming language since I started using it in 1994). I am a hacker by at least some definitions of the term. O'Reilly is easily my favorite publisher of technical books.

I'd never heard of IETF before I read this book. (IETF stands for Internet Engineering Task Force.) I gather I've been benefiting from their work for a long time. I don't make use of bind explicitly and don't know much about it, but I gather I benefit greatly from it's workings when browsing, etc.

In case you're wondering why the potpourri of references to BSD, Apache, Linux, GNU, etc., see Authors by Chapter in the left column. I'm trying to make clear that I'm enmeshed in Open Source, even though I'm not very knowledgeable about it.

The only book I'd read related to this subject before reading this one was "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software". I had also visited some of the links provided in that book with most of my attention focused on

• the GNU Project website
• Richard Stallman's personal website
• the Open Source Initiative website

I had also downloaded and listened to Richard Stallman's keynote speech at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (in San Diego, July 2002). It was, in fact, reading and writing a review of "Free as in Freedom" that led me to want to read this book.

The main thing I wanted from reading this book was to expand my exposure to how some of the people involved in Open Source think about it.

[top]

Many Points of View

One thing that particularly impresses me about this book is the many and well chosen points of view it includes. The breadth of the coverage is staggering.

diverse subjects: Each of the 15 chapters is on a different subject related to Open Source. Just peruse the table of contents will give you some sense of the variety of the subjects and perspectives included. For a list of the chapter titles, see Chapter Titles in the left column.

diverse authors: Each chapter also has a different author or authors, with the one exception that Eric Raymond, author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is author of two chapters. In addition to Eric Raymond, in this book you'll read chapters concerning Open Source by Richard Stallman (GNU), Larry Wall (Perl), Linus Torvalds (Linux), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly) and many others. For a list of the authors, see Chapter Authors in the left column. There is, by the way, an appendix containing a resume of each author. I found it useful as I definitely was not familiar with all the players.

All the authors favor Free Software or Open Source. This book is not a debate between proponents of proprietary software and proponents of Open Source. Nor is it even a debate between the Free Software Movement and the Open Source Revolution. Rather this book focuses its attention on the Open Source Revolution itself. Still, the book does exist in the context of the two debates mentioned above.

some commonality: However, whatever the subject, whoever the author, whatever the style, I felt all the chapters were clear and highly relevant. And the changes in style don't ever seem to be disconcerting. The variety makes the book rich rather than confusing. I suspect this is partly due to the editors of the book.

even more diversity: Appendix A contains mailing list posts from the famous controversy (from the very early days of Linux) between Andrew Tanenbaum (Minix) and Linux Torvalds (Linux) It includes posts by them but also by many others. The posts are fascinating and well worth reading.

[top]

Some Recurring Themes

There are a number of threads that run through the book. I identify some of them below.

why open source?: This question is addressed specifically in chapter 1 "Introduction" and in chapter 13 "Hardware, Software, and Infoware" And everything in the book in one way or another contributes to answering this question.

To understand why Open Source, it is necessary to grasp what it came out of, i.e. the Free Software Movement. Chapter 5 "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement" puts forward the case for the Free Software Movement.

history: The book is particularly rich in history. Chapter 2 "A Brief History of Hackerdom" and chapter 3 "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable" are explicitly historical. There's a good deal of history in many of the other chapters too. For example in chapter 9 "Giving It Away: How Red Hat Software Stumbled Across a New Economic Model and Helped Improve an Industry" and in chapter 14 "Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla". And it would appear that the book itself is an important piece of history in the unfolding of the Open Source Revolution.

open source as a business model: Chapter 11 "Open Source as Business Model" is explicitly on this subject. There are also chapters on particular applications of Open Source as a business model: Chapter 6 "Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account", chapter 9 "Giving It Away: How Red Hat Software Stumbled Across a New Economic Model and Helped Improve an Industry", and chapter 14 "Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla".

hackers: The Open Source movement arose out of the reaction of hackers, and especially of Richard Stallman, to the trend to make software proprietary. The role of hackers is touched on in the Introduction to this book. Eric Raymond, who among other things, authored "The New Hackers Dictionary", focuses on hackers in chapter 2 "A Brief History of Hackerdom" and chapter 15 "The Revenge of the Hackers". Richard Stallman, who started the Free Software movement, and who is still it's most articulate advocate, illuminates the early role of hackers in chapter 5 "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement". And the spirit of hackerdom is present throughout the book.

[top]