Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $14.00 | Rating: 10
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Pros:
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Reads like a novel, very entertaining and well-researched
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Cons:
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I recommend this book to everyone who wants to know how the open-source (OSS) movement started, and the key players involved.
It's quite nice to understand why (the motivation) and how some great OSS projects like Linux or Apache came to be, who's the people involved and how the thing started and developed. There are "relics" like the transcription of first e-mails Linus sent regarding his new "pet-project" in the early 90's, surviving a flamewar he had with Andy Tannenbaum about microkernel x monolithic kernel.
The strength of the book is that it's centered around people, not coding or technology. And understanding the people and their motivation/troubles/personality, it's much easier to understand the open-source movement as a whole. It also shows us that these guys are not superheroes or supergeniuses (well, not all of them), but just people with a vision and very persistent.
I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys OSS as product, methodology and philosophy.
I would love to read a follow-up of this book, covering the last 4 years (it ends up around 1999)
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