Star Book Review: Understanding Open Source Software Development
Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 30th Apr 2002 17:22 UTC
Features, Office 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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Did we read the same book?
by David G. on Wed 1st May 2002 10:51 UTC

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 "The book goes on and on about ideology, and it gives some bad and outdated examples of (failed now) companies that have adopted open source some years ago."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.