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Rebel Code
The author has a point: Open Source did turn out to be a revolution whose impact and implications went beyond the wildest dreams of its idealistic, obsessive creators and are ballooning beyond the software community and the Net.
Rebel code helped end the Microsoft era, is challenging the proprietary notions of commerce, intellectual property and censorship that have dominated business and information for a long time.
Rebel Code, by British author Glyn Moody is one of the first serious histories of this movement. It's an important story, and also a useful primer for anybody interested in how this increasingly complicated phenomenon came about.
Moody begins the book at the peak of Microsoft's rule, with the primal beginnings of Linux at the hands of Linus Torvalds, then a college student in Finland. He takes us through the development of the new system, all the way up to the newly-emerging business implications of GNU/Linux.
Today, he writes, the "open source revolution has moved on from the pioneers. Today, mainstream companies -- IBM, HP, COmpaq and SGI -- have all taken up open source in various ways. They depend critically neither on Unix, as Sun does, nor on open source, as Red Hat and other distributions do. Instead, they use both as elements of a broader strategy: selling hardware and services."
The central issue now, isn't whether Open Source companies can flourish and blossom into billion-dollar concerns, but whether free software can continue to grow and progress as it has for the last 15 years. He suggests the answer is yes.
Moody, a London-based writer who has used and written about Linux since its creation, has written for Wired, Computer Weekly and The London Financial Times. He knows his stuff. The book is crammed with OS arcania and minutiae: microkernels versus monolithic kernels and probability, and even the story of Eric Raymond's search for a new name that would be less ambiguous than "free software." (Moody credits Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, with coming up with the term "open source.")
This is probably the most definitive social chronicle of the creation of Linux and the evolution of the free software movement. It also explains why Open Source has become so important in terms of economics and business models.
Rebel Code is an investigative book with a distinctly-behind-the-scenes feel to it. It moves from tense programming breakthroughs to the cliques, feuds, business influences, ancillary discoveries and sometimes nasty politics that have marked the OS universe. All of the major players are interviewed here: Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Michael Tiemann, and Eric Raymond among many others.
Moody belives that Torvalds is unique in part because he was able to serve as a focal point for complicated programming advances, a methodology that has allowed the delegation of software programming and architectural decisions to ever expanding circles of contributors and experts. Thanks to this style -- Moody calls it "power wielded in subservience to the user base" -- software can be written and distributed much more widely.
The author also believes that Stallman will be the leader of the Free Software movement for as long as he wishes to be, but, he says, "a worthy successor who has the rare mix of qualities necessary may already be emerging in the person of Miguel de Icaza."
It turns out that Rebel Code is the perfect name for the social upheaval that Torvalds touched off.
This is a good book to mark the end of the Microsoft Era, and good preparation for the beginning of another, hopefully more open one. If Rebel Code has a flaw, it is that it's dry reading. Moody has crammed so much reporting and information into this book, and moves so relentlessly from one event, programming advance, breakthrough and benchmark to another, the real implications and human drama of what's happening sometimes sometimes slips by. If you don't know the significance of code and programming breakthroughs, they can slide by. But those of you who've lived it will enjoy seeing your own experience morphed into a historical perspective by a skilled journalist.
The book has an authentic-in-the-trenches feel to it. And no matter how technical, the Open Source revolution is exciting far beyond the techie fold. Hollywood has even made a lousy movie about it -- "Antitrust." Reading Rebel Code, you're left with the feeling that this story is just beginning.
You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
I especially liked the last paragraph of the review which read
The review was published before Balmer's and Allchin's recent intrusions on free software territory!Quite possibly the whole intention of open source has been obscured due to mainstream media popularity. Back in 1999, if it was "dot com" it was good. We all see how that worked out. I fear that industry might come to expect the same of Open Source to such a point that it becomes almost possible to live up to the public media's expectations of the paradigm, in which case it would fall out of favor and become another failed business/programming methodology in the eyes of the general public. Is Open Source supposed to be a business model, or an acceptible alternative to traditional programming practices?
Now, I'm not going to choose sides, but I =do= agree with the basic premise. Everything happens in a context, and if you miss the context, you miss the entire point of the event.
Besides, not everyone has their initials in every college physics text, the world over. :) How can I disagree with an international star? :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I actually believe the GPL is a _little_ too restrictive, and plan to use the LGPL for most stuff I do. I want improvements made to my stuff to be available to me so I can learn, and available to the world so it can benefit.
I agree with you about the role of BSD actually. :-) I have a lot of respect for BSD, but I won't use it until I see the anti-Linux and anti-GPL zealotry in that community die down. Feels icky to me, seems too much like a 'kill the other guy' competition. Perhaps I seem a bit of a GPL zealot to you, but I'm more of an anti-anti-GPL zealot zealot. *grin*
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
*shrug* We'll see. You can't predict what will happen, only experience it. If I were building a company around Open Source, I know exactly how I'd structure it, and it would make money. A lot of it.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I'm sorry, those restrictions are necessary to prevent my code from being stolen for commercial gain. If they want to use it, they have to give back. It keeps the whole thing from degenerating into the horrible scarcity based system it was in the 80s and early 90s.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
When I get some money to invest, I'll probably put some into SuSe, Redhat, or maybe Va Linux. I think they are much better buys than Microsoft is right now.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Someone mentioned that you were using the mistaken 'communist == Soviet Union' equivalence. If you want a very interesting take on the differences between communism and capitalism and how they might apply in a world of nanofacturing, read "" by Ken MacLeod. Excellent book with a very European slant on politics.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The correct link is "The Cassini Division".
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This may be 'offtopic' but there is some truth in it. Microsoft has played very creatively with how they account for options, and used various other financial tricks to enhance their apparent profitability and consistently beat analysts expectations by a very consistent amount.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Like Revenge of the Nerds, Pt 1, Pt 2?
According to the "rules of drama" you got have
a dramatic conflict, interesting characters,
and a climax. In the nerd series the conflict
was newcomers versus the establishment and each other.
There is no shortage of eccentrics like Jobs,
Gates, McNealy, and Andraessen.
The climax has usuallly been someone getting
fabulously rich off their products.
This book has the first two. I'm sure if the
process has a climax yet.
The movie "Antri-trust" had open-source as a
secondary subplot and climax.
Very well said - and that illustrates a problem that is often missed.
Microsoft's greatest enemy is its own delusion and own self-aggrandizement, as you said. And what is missed by the OS community is that their enemy is the very same traits. Ever minute spent contemplating the Flaws of Bill is a minute lost contemplating ones own potential for mistakes.
That is why I would prefer the book reviews here be more focused on the books themselves and not propaganda, even if it is supposedly "correct." Every heartbeat spent creating FUD for Open Source is a heartbeat spent legitimizing the FUD from closed-source advocates.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
By that measure, the USian style of capitalism doesn't work all that well. The Scandanavian style of socialism does appear to work very well. Of course, they have pretty much of a mono-culture (most of them are, yes, scandanavian) which helps. It was Churchill (IIRC) who said that Democracy (as practiced in the US and UK) is the worst form of government, except for all the others. The same is, in my opinion, true of the USian style of regulated capitalism.
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That's because I like that 1970's OS, crashes alot less than the 90's OS I run here at work. And, hey, if the VCs can't look out for themselves, that's their problem. Nice to see another K5er here at /.
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hehe. good try.
The ideas behind open source are about individual freedom and power, as opposed to state power.
Nothing like communism whatsoever. In fact, its closer to a form of anarchy than anything else. ie, a ruthless application of Darwinian survival of the fittest by the people. In open source its the fittest code that survives. In anarchy, its the fittest people.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
All of the above + BSD, Apache, Perl, Python...
I think Stallman is right that he is being written out of history. This is either sheer ignorance on the part of the author...
That's crap. There is quite a big, and largely complimentary, piece on him in the book. Besides, history will take care of itself. In a hundred years time, Linux will be gone. Will students be writing papers on 'the FSF and the end of intellectual property rights'. Maybe.
Actually, the book is far more balanced in that respect than the review. It notes the controversy around the Mindcraft benchmarks, Samba and W2K, the Halloween documents.
Well, yes. It's a book about Linux more than anything else. Check the title.
It does go back and try to put things in some sort of perspective. But it's not a book about the creation of the Internet, or the history of Unix. It does touch on other things: GNU and the GPL, Apache and Mozilla, Perl.
I take the point, that it's a wrong view to take the story of Linux in isolation. However, I don't think the book makes that mistake, and focussing on Linux does give it some narrative coherence.
What you have just described is not Anarchy, it is Nihilism. Classical Anarchy, as a political philosophy, began when Michael Bakunin, an early colaborator with Karl Marx, split with Marx on the issue of implementing a communist society. Bakunin coined the term "Red Bureaucracy" to describe the Marxist proposal of the dictatorship of the proletariat and predicted that such an institution would outdo the evils of any tyrant (he seems to have been correct). Anarchism holds that the only way to achieve the ideals of Marx is to eliminate all power structures between people. This would include government and corporations as some of the first structures to be dismantled. In order to survive, however, an anarchist society would require a high degree of (voluntary) cooperation between citizens -- nothing like the social darwinism proposed by Nihilism, but very close to the ideals of Free Software/Open Source.
This is actually a fantastic question: what was the first open source project?
The Iliad? Gilgamesh? Perhaps.
But I wonder if, in fact, the first *sanctioned* open source project -- a project with the same sort of "hierarchical blessing structure" that the current OS movements has -- might not be the compilation of the old and new testaments. (There might be better non-western examples -- if so, please let me know, as I'm curious about the whole hierarchical structure with promotes the cyclical path of authorship and interpretation -- canon formation, in other words. The Koran, maybe? It, like the biblical texts, was "dictated to" Mohammed by a 'divine' voice, but I'm not sure of how its actual formation -- its life after dictation -- came to be.)
There are debates about the Iliad. While it's true, they probably *are not* the result of just one author, we don't know enough about either to pin down the structure of their composition. Obviously, the Iliad was primarily oral -- a song, perhaps, or a long poem meant to be spoken/sung -- but I'm not sure if we know how what has come to be accepted as the official text actually came to *be* the 'official' text.
I don't think so. All of the people named in the article could be called "leaders" of the open source community, but no single person could be called "the leader". This community is way to fragmented and spread out for that to be true. Instead, you've got people who could definitely be considered leaders of certain areas of the community -- RMS and FSF/GNU, Miguel and GNOME, Torvalds/Cox and the kernel, etc. Don't forget that large portions of the community dislike any single one of these leaders for various political or other reasons, and some of the community dislikes the idea of any kind of leadership or centralized control.
-bluebomber
The Daily Build
Well, "as practiced in the real world", Open Source is a bunch of hobbyists struggling to reproduce a 1970s operating system, some of whom have managed to dupe venture capitalists for long enough to become unprofitable companies, but I didn't see you criticisng that.
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I do believe you mean Finland, besides Skywalker wasn't from Hoth, not to mention the Alliance got their asses kicked there.
However, if you draw a parallel between Star Wars and the Open Source revolution then Tatooine would be Finland and Redmond would be Coruscant.
Hmm now who's Yoda? Stallman?
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
And, let's face it, there probably never will be.
In order to preserve a stable communist state, protecting it from both external threats and from all those uncooprative stubborn people who would rather be rich capitalists, you need to establish a military.
In order to establish a military, you need to either create incentive for people to become soldires (by offering wealth or special treatment), or else force people to become soldiers (by drafting them).
Either way, once you take the steps neccessary to establish your military, you no longer have a communist state, because (to lift from Orwell) "some people are more equal than others".
This is why communism has only been successfully demonstrated on Gilligan's Island reruns, and not in the real world.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
But I think you need to look closer at the definition of communism. Or, at least, how it is practiced in the real world
And I think you need to look less at how it's been practised in the Soviet Union and China and more at the definition of the word. AFAIK, the point of communism was about communal sharing -- from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Ideologically, I don't see that it's inextricably linked with the idea of authoritarian control.
However, seeing as we've been through a few decades of cold war, the term and ideology of Communism have been demonized. Though some still consider it a dirty word, I think it's better to talk about socialism.
Even if the Soviet Union isn't still around, socialism is alive and well around the world. Here in the States we have social security and a graduated income tax. You don't have to call these communist if you don't want to, but I believe they were originally part of the communist party platform.
Now...as for open source...can money be made off of it? Yes. Does that make it more capitalistic than socialistic? No. I'm guessing that if Torvalds is doing alright financially today, it's probably more because he's semi-famous and not because of all his Linux royalties... Open Source is sharing something people would often be forced to pay for. Isn't that communal? Isn't that the point of communism?
-- dR.fuZZo
The book starts with linux?
Actually, I read the first chapter when it was published in Computer Weekly and it started with the 60s. Maybe this doesn't feature majorly in the book, but the extract I read spoke all about how open UNIX originally was (bug reports freely given out etc) and went on to talk about Bill Gates' rants against free software in the mid-70s. BSD was certinally also mentioned.
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
One has to wonder what the target audience for that book really is. Who is going to read it? Linux advocates and OpenSource geeks? If so, it will probably be only those amongst us who are interested in the detailed history of their own movement and who have too much time on their hand. I am interested, but I have no time to read the book. Moreover, I wonder how much of that information I don't already know just by reading through my favorite web sites during the last few years.
So J.K. apart, who will go and buy the book?
And who will really read it entirely?
Steve Ballmer to Bill Gates: "What is thy bidding, master?"
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Okay.
Technology is moving slowly.
There is nothing particularly world-changing about replacing 90Mhz processors with 1.5GHz processors. What did we get? Active Desktop, and Solitaire was upgraded to FreeCell. Power structures are still the same, the reasons people live and die are still the same, the organization of societies follows the same principles as before 512K processor caches became de rigeur.
I think computer technology stands a decent chance of having a noticeable impact on the way the world works, but it hasn't happened yet.
Uh huh. I forget - which was coming first? Practical home fusion generators or personal jetcars? Or was it household robots to do the vacuuming and walk the dogs? These things have been "coming" since 1955. So far we have AIBO to show for it.
No argument here. But this, just like the libertarian paradise that certain idiot savants are always harping about, is untenable. There is a fundamental naïveté at work here.
Some of the people in the world are extremely predisposed to greed. This in itself is not a problem; shun them Amish-style, or lock them away, or check their pockets on the way out, or whatever you need to do. The problem, however, is that greed is contagious. Once you have a smart greedy person setting an example by getting more than other people have, a share of onlookers will want to do the same. That in turn will lure still more away from the communitarian acivity du jour. At some point, the pie-in-the-sky system will break down.
It's interesting that the extreme left (communism) and left (libertarianism) fantasies suffer from the identical problem: They're constructs championed by fairly smart people who are for some reason utterly unable to comprehend the ramifications of the apparently obscure fact that not everyone will share the same motivations.
The only system that seems to be able to cope is market capitalism, which - surprise! - evolved on its own as a gradual response to how humans are inclined to behave.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I think Stallman is right that he is being written out of history. This is either sheer ignorance on the part of the author, or an attept to capitalize on hot buzzwords like "Open Source" and "Linux".
World Socialist Web Site
Remember, I said "as practiced" in the real world. Talk to anyone who grew up in Eastern Europe, or the Soviet Union, before 1990 and you'll discover that there was most certainly central control. "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is." Communism is a theory that sounds wonderful, but doesn't allow for the contrariness of human beings, and thus doesn't work in practice.
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The same goes for the idea that software isn't free unless there are onerous conditions attached to its use. The "Free Software" people also take credit for all sorts of stuff that was written by people who were largely uninterested in their ideology (Linux, Apache), or actively hostile to it (Perl, BSD). gcc and emacs were genuinely created under the Free Software banner.
As a libertarian, I found the former USSR Government quite offensive, however I've got to play the devils advocate on this post because it does miss-lead.
If we are to avoid repeating the former USSR mistakes, we need to truely understand them.
Talk to anyone who grew up in Eastern Europe, or the Soviet Union, before 1990 and you'll discover that there was most certainly central control.
The failure of the former USSR is primarily attributable to the totalitarian nature [Central Control in your words] of it's government, not to communism.
[Communism] thus doesn't work in practice.
Capitalist Governments have also collapsed.
So Capitalism thus doesn't work in practice ?
Indeed, it seems to force at least a third of the population to live in abject poverty, even in the richest countries [USA/Japan/UK/Canada/etc]. This also seems pretty totalitatian to me.
Indeed if you measure 'success' as the highest medium (rather than mean) living standards, the most successful countries are the Scandanavian countries, with near zero real poverty, and socialist (not communist!) Governments. Indeed they are also very strongly social libertarian.
I think that in the far future, maybe 100 years or so down the line, Open Source will have spread to encompass all parts of our civilisation, the very fundamental way we live, our economy, everything.
In my view, it is inevitable that our economy become communist in the distant future - when we can manufacture anything, anywhere, anytime, for no cost, our present money and job based society breaks down. We shall become a wealthy society of equals. This is the destiny of Open Source.
In the future, as more and more parts of our society become intellectualised, and as the intellectual economy does to Industry what Industry did to agriculture - overshadows it utterly - the pressures for Open Source to extend its aim beyond the software industry will redouble.
I think it will do so, and eventually our entire civilisation will be based around the ethics of the Open Source philosophy, as evinced by RMS and ESR.
And we will all be the better for it.
--
Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,
/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */
/* in its mouth... */
--Larry Wall in stab.c from perl
The Microsoft Era is over? That's news to me - right now I'm finishing my MCSD and developing a complex website on ASP. My wife does her video editing and graphic work on a windows box. Most of my friends in the tech industry deals with Microsoft as well, at times reluctantly.
I'm sure this is an excellent book - I'm very curious about it. However, broad statements like this do NOT encourage people to take reviews seriously.
This is a review, not wish-fulfillment. If Open Source has a true enemy it is NOT Microsoft or anyone else - it's self-delusion and self-aggrandizement.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I think the Open Source movement is great. However I can see what Bill Gates means when he asks what programmer can afford to spend 3 years designing, developing and testing a product only to give the entire lot (include source) away for free.
Quite simply, the majority can't. Those that can, are even more simply, gods.
Open source is great, you get to release your code, people get to pick it over, learn from it and in the process they may even help you out with it or at least spawn something off that is bigger and better. Don't know how to use TCP/IP correctly or well? Download something that does and look at its code, the only condition being that should you use any part of it then you should release your code open to the masses too.
But heres the problem. Open source software as we know it works, its indesputable. But it only works fully if the project is small. Hear me out and I'll explain why I think so.
For over a year I worked on a telemetry system for my employers. It was a Visual Basic frontend to Pro*C and Oracle backend. It was big. It also took me nearly 3 months of 9-5 working for 5 days a week to understand the entire system, how it works, the concequences of changing things and to get an understanding of the beast.
This isn't something unusual. In fact my company specifically understands this and refuses to put people on for any time less because they are only truely productive after this lead time.
So, approximately 6 hours a day for 3 months (roughly 87 days) makes 522 hours of work.
Where is this leading? Well, say this was an open source project and I was doing it in my spare time then I'd need 522 hours before I was fully acquainted with the project. Thats a lot of work and based on 2 hours per night plus 8 at the weekend thats 29 weeks before I can really truely say that I'm at a level to genuinly be able to contribute to the code. Sure, I could do the odd bug fix here and there but the GPL isn't about just doing bug fixes, its about helping the code to evolve.
Thats a lot of work for something in my free time. And unfortunately for me, time I don't have. Of course, others do and I applaud them, but IMO as the scale of the project increases the tougher it is to get people to work on it. If I GPL'ed a 20 line program the chances are the flaws and bugs and oversights would/could be fixed very quickly because it doesn't take much for people to understand the code completely.
So where is this heading? The GPL is great, without it we wouldn't have had the innovation that we've had (contrary to Microsofts belief) but I believe that for the majority of people the GPL means only that they can give it to friends for free. The average Jo Public doesn't want to look at the code and doesn't care that they can modify it and give away the modifications without some law agency hammering on their door.
What we should remember above all, is that code is a mighty beast, where everyone has differing styles and ideas. If you release code under the GPL that is big and complicated don't expect hundreds of people to come crawling out of the woodwork and help you. After all, really how many true developers are there on the Mozilla project? As in the ones that really know the system.
The "many eyes" theory is great, if the many eyes can be bothered to look and understand the code.
But before you hit the reply button or go for the "Troll" option in the moderation box please note that I am a fan of open source. I see no reason why people should distribute their code and hard work to others with a licence that almost says "here you go, do what you want with it" but those that do are truely generious individuals.
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The book starts with linux? Open source, under whatever name it had, has been around since long before the first linux kernel was released. Linux did not touch off the revolution, if it is one. It might even be considered a counter-revolution since, in the beginning, open source was the norm. Read "Hackers" by Levy, for instance. Linux may be open source, but open source is not linux. Open source is the IBM PC compatible, it is BSD, it is Perl, it is TCP/IP. It is many things that have been around since the 50's.
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Hey, I'm as big an open source and Linux fan as the rest of you, but jeez, isn't that a bit of hyperbole? Last time I checked,
All in all, I think this was a bit of undeserved braggadocio. The open source movement still has alot of work ahead of it.
----------------------------------
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
He begins the story so long after the open source movement was already well established that the interesting part of the story is being ignored.
I remember having to "bootstrap" my machines into networkable machines by downloading _source_ code to a simple pip clone (basically a 50 line serial driver) which permitted me to copy onto my machine the _source_ to kermit (back when kermit was open source). When I had that, I could then on my own machine download the _source_ to the other tools that would then enable me to compile/assemble the _source_ to the other programs that I really wanted. The variety of programs was very broad (but remember that it was almost exclusively command line programs in those days), you name a tool, you could download a copy...
At this stage Linus was just a teenager.
It's only because the Open Source "movement" (what movement?) was so strong already that Linus decided that's how he wanted his project to be.
I think that's a very long way of saying "I'm not going to buy this Linux-bandwagon-jumping book".
FatPhil
--
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
"Just remember, Gates, the harder you squeeze, the more Unices will slip through your fingers!"
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--hongpong.com
> This is a good book to mark the end of the Microsoft Era
It might well be, but the Microsoft era certainly hasn't ended. They have better market share than ever.
They are poised to take over the game console market, and yesterday announced moves to corner the mobile phone market. This combined with the increasing acceptance of Windows 2000 as the most stable and maintainable server platform around means the Microsoft era is far from over.
We have seen the beginning of open source on a large scale, but we certainly haven't seen the end of the Microsoft era.
Looks like this guy's journalistic instincts to make a story where none exists have overridden the fact of the matter - the Microsoft era hasn't ended, and Open Source is no more significant or worrisome to Microsoft than Apple; there is no sign of the kind of consumer platform where everything is done for you (speaking as someone who recently went to see a client who didn't even understand how to change resolutions and had 640*480 on a 21" monitor, the importance of the OS helping you through everything is clear), nor indeed a server platform where the all important factor - staff time and expertise in maintenance is kept low enough.
Much as it would be nice to see a kind of people's revolution for the good of all, this is nothing more than hype and journalistic bull.
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Hi!