Rating: 
Summary: Excellent intro to the best current SW development method
Review: "SW development method" does not quite convey the story here. It is a culture that is blossoming. Think of it: for so long brillian unsung heroes have contributed so much to our software progress only to have corporate bigwigs like Microsoft get all the credit; for so long proprietary software has had stifled innovation just in the way that proprietary hardware did; and for so long, competition has been stifled in a vital area of our economy by a dangerous monopoly which has resulted in the present crisis. Out comes the open source movement, revenge of the hackers as Eric Raymond would say, to set things right. New economics are upon us here, and this book is a lively and well-rounded perspective on this. Hopefully, however, it should be followed up by regular checks on the Net of the leaders who contributed. Already some important writings have been announced since this book was published. I should add here, however, that most of the material in the book I have never encountered on the Net before, so please read the book! BTW, a previous Amazon reviewer was really down on the book because it heavily criticizes Microsoft and it assumes some background knowledge in business and software. These are unfounded claims: I have no clue about business but was easily able to figure out the *tiny* amount of specific jargon from context. Likewise, I think any intelligent person could do the same with the technology presented here. When it does get a little more technical the publisher put that material in a separate appendix in the back. And of course this book is going to criticize Microsoft -- after all, Microsoft is extremely upset about what has been revealed in public about their business practices, courtesy of the DOJ trial, and they take this out on the open source community--see the "Halloween Documents" or the Wall Street Journal on Microsoft's Linux "hit team", for example. I would not consider the book to have a critical eye towards Microsoft so much as a description of an attempt to rescue a crucial market from the crisis that it is now in. Er, let's face it: a great new way to make money and feel good about yourself. :^)
Rating:
Summary: Standing on the shoulders of the Giants
Review: After reading some of the essays at OpenSource.org I wanted further background on how all these great pieces of software came about and where they are going. This book tells you how it all happened and gives some good perspective on how things are working. Some things I learned: 1) i'll use GNOME and -not- KDE, 2) Stallman and Wall are nuts, 3) openSource may not conquer end-user apps (read behlendorf's essay), and 4) cygnus took care of the crown jewels. Thank you to Perens and Raymond for changing the language of free software into the more digestible "opensource" and I look forward to helping contribute to opensource projects myself.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating read
Review: All the essays are well written, enjoyable, informative and a great read. Anyone interested in open source software, where S/W development might be going and Unix/Linux/GNU software in particular, should read this book. One or two essays showing their age, but still worth every penny. Buy it, read it, then encourage your friends to read it as well.
Rating:
Summary: Steal this book
Review: Aside from those long winded reviewers, who reads those anyway? I will keep this short and sweet. It is an informative book. I enjoyed Linus Torvald's essay, Larry Wall is nuts. In the long run, let this book be remembered as the first step in documenting the Open Source movement. Now let us stop these long winded reviews...
Rating:
Summary: Important for business, important for programmers
Review: Disclaimer: I got the book for free and never would have paid for it. That said, it is the most important book I have read in several years. The criticisms below, valid as they occasionally are, do not detract from the relevance of this book to every programmer and business person. Some essays, like the one on the history of UNIX are very boring, but provide the necessary historical context to understand the approaches that have succeeded and failed in the past. I knew nothing substantial about Open Source a few weeks ago. This is an excellent primer for someone who wants to understand it without getting into a flame war on a mailing list (one such flame is included in the book as an Appendix). Even if you hate some of the essays, you'll find plenty to love, especially those chapters on OpenSource business plans from Cygnus, RedHat, and Brian Behlendorf of Apache. This books covers everything from history, to zealotry, to business, to licensing, to engineering, to hackers, to the future. You'll find parts you agree with and parts you vehemently disagree with. That said, it will stimulate you to think about the coming tidal wave. Ignore it at your own risk.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Information, but needs serious proofing
Review: 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, Open Source 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 by O'Reilly. (Of course, there should be an "et al." behind every one of these names.) This is a great book for achieving basic literacy in the (generically-termed) Open Source movement. By reading this book, you'll get rms' view of why software must be free. (And indeed, why it eventually will be free.) You'll also find out how some companies (like the newly-merged RedHat/Cygnus conglomerate) can thrive in a market where the product is free. If you read *all* of the essays, you'll even find out why the Free Software Foundation's GPL does not work in some cases, and how "Open Source Software" is similar to and differs from "Free Software". (The below reviewer should be slapped with his Clue Stick for not taking the time to read and understand this important difference. ;-) And you'll also find out why Perl (like Larry Wall himself) is so strange and brilliant at the same time. The reason this book only gets 4 stars is due to the lack of proofing. One of Wall's diagrams is completely missing, and there are numerous typos. This is the first O'Reilly book I've seen with a lot of stupid mistakes. (And I've seen a lot of them. =) PKG
Rating: 
Summary: A HUGE disappointment
Review: First, an aside: Would someone announce--loud and clear, so everyone can hear: We've already had a chance to learn The History of Unix (canonical and apocrypha), and it wasn't all that engaging even the first time and çela ne nous intèresse pas anymore. Now the rest. The book is a collection of essays--boring, self-aggrandizing, looking disingenuous even to a most sympathetic reader (as I initially was.) The impression is that a few individuals--not particularly brilliant, somewhat embittered, historically having little to do with one another (but assembled for a cause), armed with a dictionary of quotations, locked themselves up in a room and engaged in endless recitations of pretentious nonsense--to one another. I feel they are trying to hype themselves into stardom by capitalizing on "MS evil empire" theme. There's no end to baseless yet feisty pronouncements pointing to the purportedly obvious wickedness and technical inadequacy of _whatever_ comes from MS--which are immediately countered by the authors' (very questionable and, in my opinion, not in good faith) ideas supposedly reining in The Devil. Needless to say, Tim O'Reilly et al. are thickly suggested for the role of redeemers. FUD? Noooo, everyone knows FUD only comes from MSoft. The general line is as follows: Everything "open source" is "nice" and "tightly written". All MS things are no good by definition. No argument is given--those are articles of faith. Let's see... Tim O'Reilly is thrilled--his friends don't just log on the Internet--no, it's much more subtle. Are you paying attention? Coz that's real deep--they go to Amazon.com! Wow! From that incredible revelation, by way of thick non-sequiturs the existence of a supposedly new and as supposedly important phenomenon--"Infoware"--is said to be proven. I kind of thought that I don't just drive about roads--I, like--two lefts/one right--I go shopping. Now I can do it on-line. How earth-shattering is that? Infoware my foot, Tim. Leave bs to Yourdon... Moving on: Eric Raymond (of the ponderous "Cathedral and Bazaar" fame), a self proclaimed philosopher of The Movement of The Pure divines: "Microsoft will not have an enterprise-ready operaing system, because Windows 2000 will not ship in a usable form" (at 60 million lines and still bloating, its development is out of control.)" I'm pleased to see an editor's hand in this grammatically impeccable phrase. But, how is a number of lines of code related to being "out of control"? What does it mean to be 'out of control' in this context? How many lines of code did VMS contain? MVS? System 36? But, hey: why be specific? Propaganda will do... Let's see, what else is wrong with MS? Here you go: (page 11 of Introduction) "...the major errors of the Windows NT kernels, namely the inclusion of ill tested or ill-chosen third party drivers and making the Gui part of the kernel." But drivers _by definition_ are ALWAYS part of a kernel, in _any_ operating system, even in--would you believe it--Linux. What's left? "ill tested" I guess. How are they ill-tested? Hmmm... here: If it comes with "MS" on it, it's got to be bad. Linux drivers, otoh, are never ill-tested <g>. Repeat after me, boys and girls: linux drivers--along with everything else from the "open source movement"--are always "nice" and "tightly written." (That's because the open source movement comprises only geniuses (programming- and other-wise.) Just look at those de rigueur "when he's not busy programming" nauseatingly cheezy blurbs on the back cover. A word about Larry Wall (whose Perl I like) and his contribution to this book. First, I've already seen this article somewhere. Second, the man must be on drugs. His essay, imo, beats all else in this book in terms of priestly-highfalutin mindless drivel. (Not that the rest of the book is *very* far away ;-) Btw, I gotta say that a) MS doesn't pay me to write that, and b) I had always attributed a lot of class to O'Reilly. Well, bummer... we're all human, I guess. They didn't keep it up after all. I've always suspected something, namely that--to paraphraze the bloated Goebbels Limbaugh--preoccupation with computer "hacking" is a way for physically unattractive males to enter the mainstream of society. Anyway. I'm very irritated by this book. I suggest you don't buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Mixed Bag
Review: I agree with many of the reviewers below that this book was helpful and often interesting. It gives a readable orientation to one of the most important movements in the software industry today, and the editors have been fortunate to gather together so many contributors who obviously know whereof they speak. In particular, the editors' Introduction, Eric Raymond's "Brief History of Hackerdom," Richard Stallman's account of GNU and FSF, Bruce Perens's discussion of Open Source, and Tim O'Reilly's essay on "Infoware" were informative and thought-provoking. That said, it should be noted that the Amazon reviewer above gets it wrong when she writes that the book gives a "fascinating look at the raging debate." In fact, *nothing* about Open Source is debated in this book, which is a major disappointment. As the reviewer from Princeton below notes, the goodness of everything Open Source and the badness of everything Microsoft seems to be a given for many of the writers. At the risk of criticizing the book for not being something its creators didn't intend, I think it would be greatly improved with the addition of a wider range of viewpoints and even a dissenting voice or two. (There are a number of essays that could give place to some alternate content: Eric Raymond's second essay, "The Revenge of the Hackers," leans heavily toward the self-congratulatory, as does the Netscape cheerleaders' "Story of Mozilla." And Larry Wall's "Diligence, Patience, and Humility" seems to have been included not on its own merits but on the author's reputation as the Perl Deity.) A final wish is for the book to address a broader range of readers. As a longtime computer user but a relatively new programmer, with no formal business training, I found many of the essays to rely heavily on the jargon of hackers and MBAs. More editorial control here, in addition to a broader range of content, would make this book seem less like preaching to the choir and more effective at spreading the Open Source gospel.
Rating:
Summary: Worth Investigating!
Review: I found this book to contain many ideas about the progress now taking place in the field of collaborative software development. Furthermore it contains many other interesting theses about the development of computer technology. For instance, Tim O'Reilly's article begins with the observation that some of his friends were thinking of getting a computer not for the web in general, but so they could use Amazon.com. Thus we see that a "killer application" make take the form not of "software" in the classical sence, but of an individual website. He defines "infoware" to be this form of application, and then propounds the thesis that there was an era in which hardware manufacturers dominated the computing industry, then software manufacturers, and that now the playing field is shifting to the area of infoware.
Rating:
Summary: Great Summary of the History of Open Source
Review: I loved the way that all the major players in the industry were brought together to write this book. They all had such a different spin on things, but underneath all the differences they still had the same goal, to write and share code.
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