The good people over at Addison-Wesley sent us this book, "Understanding Open Source Software Development" written by Joseph Feller & Brian Fitzgerald. It is an analysis of the history of the open source, its goals, where it is now and where it is expected to be in the near future. The ultimate goal and target of the book, apart from the knowledge feed about open source in general, seems to be the effort to convince project managers why they should adopt Open Source. Does the book succeed? Read on.
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Is this the same Brian Fitzgerald who wrote TaxMan for the Apple II?
Hmm. Nice review, but the rating and the review seem kinda, mismatched. From the review it seems like it would get a rating of 5 or so, but you gave it a rating of 7. Mabye it's just me, but that seems kinda off...
7 out of 10 is the smallest rating I have given to a book review to date. In fact (and you can ask Ed Boyce, Adam Scheinberg and Jeremy Kuek about this for confirmation - they are osnews writers), the original rating was 6/10, but the last minute before publication I realized that I was a bit harsh on the rating indeed, so I decided to up it a bit... :-)
Reading this review after reading the book left me a bit confused - three things in particular struck me as strange:
1. "The book mentions seven companies where all their main products are open source. It is funny, but only two of these companies are today still in business or still in the open source or Linux business."
Actually, only 2 of the 7 are out of business, not the other way around (although there have been some recent name changes) - but that's just nitpicking 
2. "The book goes on and on about ideology, and it gives some bad and outdated examples of (failed now) companies that have adopted open source some years ago."
Which companies are you thinking of? Sun? IBM? Red Hat? They seem pretty healthy to me.
3. "The biggest problem with the book is that it is an ideology book."
I found it to be quite the opposite. Parts of the book did attempt to explain the ideological positions of various open source players, but the bulk of the book dealt with describing the open source software process, the open source application space, etc. Actually, there is a whole chapter devoted to the challenges and potential problems of open source - hardly what I call evangelism.
I bought the book after reading a review by Mike Tarrani ( http://zaratetarrani.blogspot.com/?/2002_03_24_zaratetarrani_archiv... ) (March 26, '02) - this might serve as a good second opinion for other readers.
David G.