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Review:Open Sources
Each of these essays is an interesting read. The book starts off with ESRs 'Brief History of Hackerdom' which is an enjoyable read, although its a history that most of us are already familiar with. Marshall Kirk McKusick's piece follows with an in depth history of UNIX and BSD. Much of this information was new to me- it was one of my favorite sections in the book. And Linus talks about the Linux Kernel.
RMSs piece is, well, an RMS piece. Its interesting, but nothing new if you're familiar with RMS and the FSF. But if you aren't its an excellent little primer on the topic And that is important considering that this books target isn't as much the hacker, as it is the hacker's Boss. This is especially obvious after reading the articles by Bob Young and Michael Tiemann. Each article is an interesting look at the Open Source movement, but told through the eyes of the businessman.
Bruce Perens defines Open Source, A band of folks from Netscape including Tom Paquin talk about Mozilla from Netscape's perspective, and ESR writes a nice bit on the movement from the other side.
But my personal favorite bit is 'Diligence, Patience, and Humility' by Larry Wall. It seems curiously out of place in this book. Most every essay is a good read for "Your Boss" but this one is clearly for the artsy hacker type. Wall talks about communication, programming, philosophy, and pretty much anything else that comes to his mind in this humorous but insightful rambling essay. It alone was worth the price of admission.
So anyway, if your boss asks you what Open Source is, this is the book. If he ask you why it is, this is also the book. If you want to read an interesting collection of essays by the people who made this movement happen, this is the book. It is one of the few books that I'm glad I own- taking its place besides my few other favorite (mostly Dave Barry, Douglas Adams, and various O'Reilly Animal) dead tree editions. Highly recommended. A 9 out of 10.
If you are interested in purchasing this book, click here.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone
A Brief History of Hackerdom
Eric S. Raymond
Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to
Freely Redistributable
Marshall Kirk McKusick
The Internet Engineering Task Force
Scott Bradner
The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement
Richard Stallman
Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account
Michael Tiemann
Software Engineering
Paul Vixie
The Linux Edge
Linus Torvalds
Giving It Away: How Red Hat Software Stumbled Across a
New Economic Model and Helped Improve an Industry
Robert Young
Diligence, Patience, and Humility
Larry Wall
Open Source as a Business Strategy
Brian Behlendorf
The Open Source Definition
Bruce Perens
Hardware, Software, and Infoware
Tim O'Reilly
Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla
Jim Hamerly and Tom Paquin with Susan Walton
The Revenge of the Hackers
Eric S. Raymond
Appendix A: The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate
Appendix B: The Open Source Definition, Version 1.0
That is a must have. If Open Source did not exist, I'd be doing something completely different. This is what moves me.
Thanks for the plug Cmdr!
Anybody got an ISBN for that book?
Anyway, I guess I'd best get this book right now.
I just picked up Open Sources and have found it to be a great read. Kirk McKusick is an excellent writer and his history of BSD is required reading for the Linuxen out there.
:-)
One thing does bother me about this book - where's the animal? O'Reilly is starting to not use animals on the cover (Cracking DES is another example) and I think this bothers me more than them making money off Open Source / Free Software.
Just want to mention that Michael Tiemann's piece on Cygnus Solutions is available online from the cygnus main website. It's a very well-written piece.
/.
Two important pieces that's LACKING from the book are, IMHO,
1. Donald Knuth, TeX, Metafont, And The Art Of Computer Programming
2. Peter Deutsch, PostScript, GhostScript, And Alladin.
--
IIO, my fifth post to
-- Weiqi Gao weiqigao@speakeasy.net
Open Source for whom?
Get a grip.
I assume you don't object to paying for the physical entity...
Are you concerned that the individuals who contributed have copyright over their work?
That's a seperate question entirely. Since I have no plans to make money by re-using what they have written, I'm more than happy to pay for it.
-----
The final draft of Bruce Perens' chapter "The Open Source Definition" is on-line, as is Eric Raymond's prologue ""The Real Programmers".
. . . anyhow, read RMS's writings on the subject; there are actual reasons for his convictions. These have to do with the fact that both users and the software itself suffer if the source is not available. How does this translate to book publishing? If your copy has some errors, you can pencil in "patches" in the margins, or if it's really bad you can staple in another sheet. You can post the fix on Slashdot and/or on the relevant newsgroups, and you can fire it off to the publisher as well -- which is absolutely as much as you can do about a bug in gawk or something. I have a lot more faith in O'Reilly's willingness to listen to reader feedback than most other publishers -- but, ultimately, if you submit a patch for gawk, the maintainers don't have to use it.
Okay, in the case of books, you can't fork the tree. That's a real issue. Any comments?
Yeah, it'd be nice if they made the whole thing available for download, but they've a right to choose not to. Personally, my impression is that Tim O'Reilly tries at times to put his thumb on the scales and (IMHO) slag off Stallman a bit in favor of the Raymond camp, but O'Reilly's ethics as a publisher (as demonstrated by the quality of the books he publishes) are the best in the publishing industry.
That's not really a new thing; their Linux books seem to use old-style drawings of cowboys (Running Linux, Olaf Kirch's networking book), and their Java books use digitally manipulated stock photos.
Didn't one security-related book in the Nutshell series use an image of a lock and key?
:-)
Get off my lawn.
Thank you for ordering from Amazon.com!
1 copy of "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System (Unix and Open Systems Series.)"
Marshall Kirk McKusick(Editor), et al; Hardcover; @ $55.95 each
(Usually ships in 24 hours)
1 copy of "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (O'Reilly Open Source)"
Mark Stone(Editor), et al; Paperback; @ $19.96 each
(Usually ships in 1-2 weeks)
As the reviewer says, this is a book that would appeal to your boss.
That's a very different market place to the technical nutshell series. People associate the 'old animal drawings' brand with books that techies have close at hand. It would be confusing to use that same look for a book that a curious executive might read over a weekend or dip into during a long business flight.
O'Reilly (nutshell) covers are fantastic, but what is really special is the excellent typography and layout inside. I hope they keep that across their whole range.
-----
I'd imagine that many of these papers are
available for free, two have already been
referenced. Can someone here post a list of
URL's? Or maybe some rogue would be willing
to type up the missing "encumbered" stuff and
pass it to a bunch of mirror sites?
The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is 1565925823. Try looking at the link above for ordering the book. A quick search on one of the big on-line booksellers is also a fast way of getting this information for mainstream publishers.
Nice review. Why don't you post it on Amazon?
There's more to it than this.
do you have the URL to this?
Does it come with errata appendices to fix and re-fix Bruce's ever-changing philosophies?
There have been lots of books w/o the animals:
The Definitive Guides to the X Window System
"In true sound..." -Agents of Good Root
i can't understand why ESR can even be mentioned in the same book as people like RMS. He's done nothing for open source but shoot his mouth off.
(yes i know he wrote a couple of tiny programs once. big deal).
I would strongly suggest you buy the book. Not only are you supporting O'Reilly & Associates who happen to be a great focal point for the Open Source Software movement. But think about what things will be like 10 years from now. This book is already a legacy, a piece of lore of a kickass culture.
Here's an interview with Brad Wardell that talks about Linux and Open Source:
http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/wardell.htm
In it, he makes the claim that it's quite possible to enhance and expand an OS without needing the source code. An snippet:
"Many people, particularly Linux advocates, feel that you have to have the source code in order to extend the OS. That's only because of the way Linux was designed."
--
Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
1) Because Sam Ockman had something to do with it. This man is the King Midas of Linux. Everything he touches turns to gold. SVLUG sucked until Sam got all the best speakers to come. VAResearch sucked until Sam fixed it, and then it still sucked so he started Penguin Computing (which makes a wicked Linux box by the way). This man has done more for Linux advocacy in speaking with the big corporate entities than Bruce Perens or Eric Raymond or any of those guys (who tend to preach to the choir more). You won't see Sam posting much here on Slashdot because he is busy preaching to the unsaved. He's probably the single biggest underdog hero in this whole free software movement.
2) Because RMS makes such an ass out of himself every time he opens his mouth. This should be good for comic relief.
http://www.cygnus.com/news/tiemann.pdf
(or follow the anchor "Learn how Cygnus
Builds the World's Best Compilers by Sharing
the Source Code" under "What's New" on the
Cygnus home page).
--
Neil Hoggarth
neil.hoggarth@physiol.ox.ac.uk
personally, i respect people who *do* things, not people who just talk about other folk's work.
ESR is the dilbert-style marketing slime of the open source world.
Posted by abk:
n
I enjoyed the book, though it wasn't consistently great it had some excellent chapters. The chapters by Tim O'Reilly and Larry Wall I enjoyed the most. It gives you a good idea of what the open source movement is about and has inspired us to think of how we can be more open in our projects. I reviewed it at:
http://www.webreference.com/new/990201.html#ope
You need to knife trees in order to make books, but forks aren't necessary.
Sorry, couldn't resist
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
I am working a 100% free sequel to this book, called Copy This Book! It will contain the GPL-ed essays from the Open Sources book, and other essays that are under licenses that are compliant with the DFSG/OSD.
I'll have the first version online this evening. If you'd like to write for this, start writing, and e-mail me at copythis@hams.com.
I think it's time for hackers to take back charge of their information sources. This is my first step, there will be more.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
I've added it to the list above (sengan)
He also took over maintenance of the Jargon File (another must-read) from Guy Steele, and has maintained it for a number of years before the term "Open Source" ever came into usage. He had already set a precedent for documenting hacker nature, so it's not unusual that he was thrust into the position of spokesman.
--
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
The PHB's think "oh, Open Source -- that Raymond guy invented that!" There was some PHB article posted here yesterday, written by an IT journalist bonehead, which said that the Free Software people had "hijacked" open source. I am not making this up. Think about it! For Raymond, that's a remarkable coup. He must be very pleased with himself -- and I wouldn't be suprised if he's managed to convince himself that it's true, too.
ESR has a great talent for publicizing himself, but he's not much use for anything else. He's also just as ideologically pure as RMS -- if you don't agree with his little dogmas (e.g. that free software is all about Raymond's ego) -- then you're not welcome in OSI. Heh. OSI putatively represents all of us, but the fact is that it represents Raymond only. If you agree with Raymond, that's fine, but Raymond is, in fact, a carpetbagger. He's selling free software by denying the very things that make it what it is. Not only that, but he persists in embarrasing the community with his adolescent anti-Microsoft rhetoric and childish publicity stunts (e.g. showing up at Refund Day in a costume -- that event should have risen to the level of "consciousness-raising", and mostly it did, but Raymond did everything he could to hijack it and turn it into a moronic circus). I, personally, am disgusted with that guy, and I am absolutely furious that he has the gall to pretend that he represents those who are actually doing serious work.
RMS has provided us with the GPL (yeah, it's just a symbolic piece of paper -- but so is the Declaration of Independence) and he has also presided over the GNU project, which is a very solid, consistent, and large body of the best and most stable software out there. We all use it because it's good, and we can all point to it when somebody says that free software has quality problems. Whatever they've got, the GNU tools are tighter and more robust. RMS wasn't just making noises all these years; he was laying a large portion of the groundwork that made the whole thing possible. Linus Torvalds and the kernel people are indispensible, too, of course -- but Eric Raymond has nothing to do with any of this. He's just some random jerk who wants to get his name in the paper. RMS is a pain in the ass, certainly, and he pisses me off too sometimes -- but he's got principles, and he's putting his work where his mouth is. Those two things count.
You're a raving NT supporter and spreader of FUD. You're about as well qualified to rate ESR against RMS as Jim Falwell is to choose the next head of Atheists of America.
--
Xenu loves you!
The argument that Open Source is not necessary can only be made if you assume the base of the system is stable enough to be a good platform upon which to build on.
This is where Linux is eons ahead of OS/2, and it is primarily due to Linux being GPL'd versus OS/2 being closed. If this were not true, why would everyone and their grandmother be calling for IBM to release the code to OS/2?
Don't get me wrong, I used to adore OS/2 and used it over Windows 3.1 when the two competed. I liked the WPS and thought it was great, but after using Linux for a number of years now, there is simply no way I will go back. Linux has it beat in every aspect (except perhaps not having a unified UI based on a good object model... yet...)
Rewriting history to suit his needs.
He is a cynical lier!
Hey kitten, I've seen your other articles. You're just a troll.
Take a look at that archetype of "Open Source", the development of Western Science.
Heisenberg and Einstein mixed it up plenty about quantum mechanics.
But at the end of the day, they all did good solid open source physics work.
The differences between RMS and ESR are real, but they are actually superficial compared to the areas they agree on.
Sometime what needs to be "done" is a little talk and hype. It's Unfortunate marketting and engineering do not often mix (I agree, they are slime, but a neccesary slime). If total world domination is really your objective, you need someone with ESR's skills to bring what RMS and Linus (plus the other gazillion of you) have done into the limelight. If you don't like ESR and how he does things then take a lesson from your own book and do it better yourself. Until somebody with these skills steps forward you will be stuck with him.
In short: put up or shut up.
Open This Book's Source
...and then in three more months...
Contribute To This Book's Content
...and then...
This Book Free For Non-Commercial Use
There are an infinity of philosophies and you apparently intend to try them all. That's fine for you. But don't expect us to rely upon your shifting-sands viewpoint.
BTW, don't bother to flame me for being an AC. That's only Rob's name for me.
Being a psuedo-geek myself (haven't quite labotomized the right side completely) I hope this terrible trend in critterless covers doesn't coleus into anything more concrete. It gives rise to contemplative concern, to be concise.
Carl Forhan
Songbird Productions
http://songbird.atari.net
Doh. Sam's Cred
Todd's Cred
Oh yes, and you've done SO MUCH for the open source movement???
Quite shooting your mouth off ya jackass!!!!!!!!
OK, OK, your point is taken. My pithy cliche was out of line. Please bitch and moan about ESR until you are blue in the face. We'll see how much good it does.
I thing you are confusing the editors. Bill Gates will add this chapter, and also another "Why Windows is actually OpenSource, and how I initiated the whole Open Source movement", but in his own book "The Road Ahead"
Yes, but will he release the new book as a "Service Pack", or an "Upgrade"? Either way, it's sure to have a "Y2K Compliant!" sticker on it....
He wrote large parts of Nethack. Everybody knows
games is what really matters.
...he is a SubGenius.
Before Stanford, he worked with me for Ivan Stang in Dallas on much of the SubGenius publications you grew up with and loved.
Sam is Elvis Presley, Jello Biafra, and Uma Thurman all rolled up into one lucious package.
CmdrTaco,
/. page!
This post should be on the main
Does it have to be an engraving. We just want an animal.
This is the late 1990s, where you aren't even allowed to THINK "and his grandmother..." because it's not Politically Correct... Saying their, while being wrong gramatically, is correct politically. Except to those who's grandmothers are dead. Now you just offended a whole new group of people.
Or how did you think that Linux ended up being hyped by the media so much with hardly a mention of the BSDs?
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
Jon Katz is a waste of space. ESR should be a regular contributor here, with Sam Ockman thrown in for more enlightenment.
Does the New Geek really not read books? Is this because they live on the edge of a transition to new media, because they prefer "here-and-now" hands-on experience to "old-and-stuffy" accumulated learning, or because they believe that nothing in the "old world" could possibly pertain to the "new world" they live in?
Is this anti-intellectualism, snobbery, short-sightedness, or pragmatic foresight?
And is our beloved CmdrTaco espousing it or making fun of it?
Read this guy's backlog of posts, he's just a troll. Please one of you moderators out there, get rid of this guy.
-Erik-
I feel like taking a subset of OS/2 and porting it to a 8086 computer.
Can anyone do this without the source?
I hate when people accuse OS/2 users of not contributing to their OS. What? So you pay IBM big bucks, and you still have to work so that IBM will gain even more bucks?
I like the Internet, but I can't find all books I like online, and as much as I developed imunity to reading on screen, I still prefer paper.
This is the real Sam Ockman.
This is the real Todd Andersen.
--
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
I've read 4 books this week alone. None of them were technical, but all were educational (about livestock husbandry).
On-line documentation is great for reference and short documents but for long documents nothing beats a dead tree. My eyes hurt after 6+ hours of looking at a CRT.
High Tech Redneck stuff at Yonder Way
I found it rather disapointing that you don't read books these days. Web pages tend to be poorly edited, terrible english (those that are written by english speaking writers) and are often lacking in focus.
I think the better writing you read the better writer you will become. (Kinda like coding eh?) If you want to take it to the next level you'll need to develop those skills a bit more.
All the best to you bud.
Peace
Bottles $2.00
Holding your head while you puke $25.00
That's the open-source philosophy: Make the product free, the packaging affordable, and support expensive.
They ran out of them. Check back in a few years when they discover new species.
RMS is a jackass.
I suppose that's your personal opinion. That's not relevant to this discussion.
Every time he opens his mouth he chases the mainstream away from Linux and free software. He looks and smells like a wookie, and totally lacks any sense of professionalism.
Perhaps you miss the point. RMS has a goal of making good Free Software. He does not have a goal of selling such software and getting rich from it. If companies want to use it, that's fine by him, but he's not going to sell out his principles to make a quick buck, which is more than I can say for Mr. Raymond.
After all those years of "free software advocacy" RMS has gotten us nowhere.
Excuse me? "Nowhere"? Do you have really not have any idea of the history of what you're talking about, or are you just a troll?
RMS founded the Free Software Foundation, which started the GNU project. The GNU project is a project to produce a completely Free Operating System. At the moment, it is nearly finished except for the kernel. Until the kernel (HURD) is finished, you can run the rest of the OS with the Linux kernel (a GNU/Linux combination). Without GNU, and hence without RMS, there would be no Linux, as Linus would probably not have decided to undertake the task of writing a kernel if he also had to write the rest of the OS (his own C compiler (there would be no gcc), C library (no glibc), and various other things, such as ls, cat, grep, chmod, etc.)
Then ESR comes along. He understands how the corporate managers think. He can get on the phone with people like Lou Gerstner and talk their language. RMS comes off like some homeless turd preaching about the apocolypse on a street corner.
People like Sam Ockman and ESR brought us the current prosperity that we enjoy. RMS has held us back for YEEEEARS. It has nothing to do with code. It has to do with advocacy.
ESR has repackaged Free Software by removing such objectionable things as "freedom" and repackaging it as Open Source. As such, he's sold the package to business at the expense of selling out the principles and philosophy behind the Free Software movement. This is why Bruce Perens quit the Open Source Initiative - because it's Free Software that matters.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hmm, so since he criticized the X Windowing System (which pretty much sucks for the reasons he mentioned) he's suddenly somebody on a secret mission from Microsoft?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
My boss has been spouting Linux-or-die propaganda for months every time he sees me, because he thinks it's what I want to hear. I was getting kind of tired of it, so I decided to fill him in on what he was talking about. I bought the book, and handed it to him. Today, he called me and said "Hey, this is a good book!" with that tinge of surprise that told me he was being genuine.
Great book. Gotta get another copy.
palmtops aside (which might come into play later) it's difficult to move e-text around in the real world. I'd rather not have to take my Newton into the bathroom or to the beach or to...wherever. even an easy chair can be problematic if the screen glare/LCD brightness/is not optimal.
man, the only reason i ever go to that horrible mall road thing is the taco bell. the tower there sucks (all towers suck, come to think of it :) and i hate those strip mall things.
and WTF is up with the paving on middlesex turnpike?!?! horrible, horrible, horrible.
That's not the point. The point is that X's network functionality is unneeded bloat and inefficient for those who just want to run a single non-networked desktop. Writing directly to the monitor, as non-networked GUIs do, would be more efficient.
Also, X is getting really old and decrepit. Just to get decent fonts in it requires some pretty extensive patching.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
FYI, i run red hat at home, and use bash and xemacs every day.
there is a *lot* of good open source stuff, but linux isn't an example of it.
Ahem. You obviously have never run a successful website. I suspect said geek is neither a snob nor an anti-intellectual. However, I'd be willing to bet money that he spends ALL of his time trying to make sure he has enough ad revenue to pay for his monthly bandwidth useage so that users like yourself can pound on his system daily.
It's not that he doesn't want to read books. It's that he doesn't have the time to read them, because he's running Slashdot, something that I rely on daily for news. Give the guy a break.
When we first started putting animals on our books, the only books we published were hands-on books for hackers--or more specifically, for programmers, system administrators and power users who wanted to get under the hood of whatever program they were using.
Somewhere in there, we published our X books, which were targetted at corporate adoption as reference manuals. At the time, we weren't that well known, and the animals were a little too wierd for the suits, so we developed a more conventional look for the X books.
Now, we're so well known that the animals have cachet even with big companies. But over the years, we still realized that not all our books are the same, and we wanted the animal brand to represent a particular kind of book--a hands on book, by people on the front lines, for people who wish they could look over their shoulder.
So, over the years, we've tended to not use animals on books that aren't "how to" books. The first time I made that decision, it was for a Posix Reference Manual. It was a good book, but kind of dry, and I didn't think it represented the kind of book that people expected from us. So I decided it shouldn't have an animal so that people's expectations wouldn't be set wrong.
We've blown it a few times. For example, when we started publishing our Java series, we decided to create a new, somewhat tamer, look because, once again, we were thinking of that as a consistent series for corporate adoption. But as it turned out, we didn't need to do that (because even the corporations now think that the animals are cool). Ever since then, we've had furious debates internally about whether to switch back to the animals for the Java books, since they really are the same kind of hands-on books as our original UNIX books. As the company has evolved, we've done some variations as well--the Linux cowboy imagery, the lock and key engravings on security books, and so on.
We've also done some books--the Be reference manuals, for instance (BE, Inc.), and in those cases, we've used a non-animal look because those books were not solely our product, with our kind of approach.
Edie Freedman, the creative genius behind the animal brand, is worried about eventually running out of animals, but that isn't an issue yet.
The animals have become a powerful brand because they mean something: hands on books for hackers.
To bring this back to Open Sources, it's a book of essays, not a hands-on book, and that's why we didn't put an animal on it.
Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 http://www.oreilly.com