http://www.osnews.com/story/1011/Book_Review_Understanding_Open_Source_Software_Development Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:46:32 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Is this the same Brian Fitzgerald who wrote TaxMan for the Apple II? Tue, 30 Apr 2002 18:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? 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... Tue, 30 Apr 2002 23:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? 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... :-) Wed, 01 May 2002 00:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? what does it take to get a 1/10? Wed, 01 May 2002 05:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Worse grammar than mine. Wed, 01 May 2002 05:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? 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 "The book goes on and on about ideology, and it gives some bad and outdated examples of (failed now) companies that have adopted open source some years ago."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. Wed, 01 May 2002 10:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? lol! Wed, 01 May 2002 11:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments