Glyn MoodyBesprekingen

I can't give this a star rating. It began excellently, and ended in irrelevant trivia, and farce.

I read this book very much from a personal historical perspective, since I lived the history it recounts and know many of the people in it, either personally or by reputation. (I also happened to be frequently corresponding with one of the people most quoted in it, for unrelated reasons, as I read it.)

So, really I enjoyed the first 100 or so pages of the book, which covered years before I got very involved in this stuff. I'd heard that history before, but this stuck me as a more complete version, taken from closer to the source. That first section kept me reading too late for a few nights.

Then it went downhill, with endless details about company's shenanigans during the dotcom bubble. Was there, don't want to hear it again. The latter half of the book is a snapshot of a particularly deranged moment in time, which has perhaps of historical value, but not personal historical value. In the end I plowed though it only because Goodreads
told me I'd been reading this book for a month.

I will leave you with ... the farce! (From the last page of the book)

«Stallman says despairingly. "I'm going to keep working on the free software movement because I don't see who's going to replace me."
Nevertheless, a worthy successor who has the rare mix of qualities neccessary may already be emerging in the person of Miguel de Icaza.«

Entertaining and interesting account of the history of open source software development and the people that drove it.

Good, but not great. The author's political bias was readily apparent.

Using the example of Linux as the prototypical case, the book describes the history of the open source movement.

Rebel Code is the compelling account of how a band of mavericks took on big business and revolutionized the computer world.
In 1991 a young student, Linus Torvalds, bought a PC and began writing a new software program. It started as a hobby, but in a few years he and a global alliance of hackers, linked by the Net, had developed an operating system that now threatens Microsoft. GNU/Linux is used by millions, and most troubling of all for the corporate giants, it is free.
In this definitive account, Glyn Moody tells the astonishing David-and-Goliath story of Linux, placing it in the broader history of the free software movement, and shows what can be achieved when creativity and co-operation rise above the profit motive.

Nice book about the history and background to the development of linux os.

A rather better than average book about Open Source.
Not just the basics were covered (GNU, Linux) but most of the various necessary extras (Mozilla, XFree86, Apache, Samba, KDE, GNOME and so on).
I'd have liked a slightly stronger technology slant, and I think databases and file systems were slighted, but overall a very good read.½

The bad news is that this book is written by a journalist, with all the pathologies that implies, including far far too many exact quotes, and an obsession with who, when, where rather than what and why.
The good news is that the subject material is intrinsically interesting, and the book does not waste much time telling us what we already know, the standard Darwin, Mendel, Watson and Crick stuff.

One interesting thing that came out of it is that Craig Venter doesn't seem to be nearly as bad a guy as the impression I'd received of him; it really does seem that at every stage of the game his goal was to get to the data, and to make it public, not to monopolize it and make himself rich, and that when Celera started to renege a little on making the data public he left.

Unlike previous books I've read, this one does at least start to touch on the issue of personal genomes, ie how individuals differ. However I was disappointed by the discussion which seemed to imply that single nucleotide changes are all that matters. I have to wonder if this is really what most scientists think, or if this is simply the same sort of dumbed-down doctrine that gave us the central dogma and junk DNA, a sort of pathological inability to accept that what we don't know might actually be not just important, but perhaps even more significant than what we do know.

In summary I'd have to say "wow". This book covered a vast amount of material and showed me just how much has happened in biology in the last five years or so. Now I need to read another ten or so more books to consolidate the information.½