First of all, take a look at the list of authors. It reads as a "Who's Who" guide for the software and tools I'm running on my current system. (Kernel by Torvalds, GNU/Free Software by Stallman, OpenSource Software by a number of individuals/companies (esr, Perens),development tools by Cygnus (Tiemann), DNS by Vixie, web server by Apache(Behlendorf), CGI programming in Perl by Wall, browser by Netscape(Hamerly, Paquin), Linux Distribution by RedHat (Young), and references byO'Reilly. (Of course, there should be an "et al." behind everyone of these names.)This is a great book for achieving basic literacy inthe (generically-termed) Open Source movement.
By reading this book,you'll get rms' view of why software must be free. (And indeed, why iteventually will be free.) You'll also find out how some companies (like thenewly-merged RedHat/Cygnus conglomerate) can thrive in a market where theproduct is free.
If you read *all* of the essays, you'll even find outwhy the Free Software Foundation's GPL does not work in some cases, and how"Open Source Software" is similar to and differs from "FreeSoftware". (The below reviewer should be slapped with his Clue Stickfor not taking the time to read and understand this important difference.;-)
And you'll also find out why Perl (like Larry Wall himself) is sostrange and brilliant at the same time.
The reason this book only gets 4stars is due to the lack of proofing. One of Wall's diagrams is completelymissing, and there are numerous typos. This is the first O'Reilly book I'veseen with a lot of stupid mistakes. (And I've seen a lot of them. =)
PKG
Click Here to see more reviews about: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (O'Reilly Open Source) (Paperback)
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