Product Description

"Open Sources 2.0" is a collection of insightful and thought-provoking essays from today's technology leaders that continues painting the evolutionary picture that developed in the 1999 book "Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution". These essays explore open source's impact on the software industry and reveal how open source concepts are infiltrating other areas of commerce and society. The essays appeal to a broad audience: the software developer will find thoughtful reflections on practices and methodology from leading open source developers like Jeremy Allison and Ben Laurie, while the business executive will find analyses of business strategies from the likes of Sleepycat co-founder and CEO Michael Olson and Open Source Business Conference founder Matt Asay. From China, Europe, India, and Brazil we get essays that describe the developing world's efforts to join the technology forefront and use open source to take control of its high tech destiny. For anyone with a strong interest in technology trends, these essays are a must-read. The enduring significance of open source goes well beyond high technology, however. At the heart of the new paradigm is network-enabled distributed collaboration: the growing impact of this model on all forms of online collaboration is fundamentally challenging our modern notion of community. What does the future hold? Veteran open source commentators Tim O'Reilly and Doc Searls offer their perspectives, as do leading open source scholars Steven Weber and Sonali Shah. Andrew Hessel traces the migration of open source ideas from computer technology to biotechnology, and Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger and Slashdot co-founder Jeff Bates provide frontline views of functioning, flourishing online collaborative communities. The power of collaboration, enabled by the Internet and open source software, is changing the world in ways we can only begin to imagine. "Open Sources 2.0" further develops the evolutionary picture that emerged in the original Open Sources and expounds on the transformative open source philosophy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #387959 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 445 pages

From the Publisher
Open Sources 2.0 is a collection of insightful and thought-provoking essays from today's technology leaders that continues painting the evolutionary picture that developed in the 1999 book Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution.

These essays explore open source's impact on the software industry and reveal how open source concepts are infiltrating other areas of commerce and society. The essays appeal to a broad audience: the software developer will find thoughtful reflections on practices and methodology from leading open source developers like Jeremy Allison and Ben Laurie, while the business executive will find analyses of business strategies from the likes of Sleepycat co-founder and CEO Michael Olson and Open Source Business Conference founder Matt Asay.

About the Author
Chris DiBona is an open source software evangelist at Google. He co-edited Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (the original collection of essays) and was an editor at Slashdot.org. He has also produced Linux segments on TechTV for The ScreenSavers.

Mark Stone has made a career out of studying collaborative communities. As a university professor with a PhD in philosophy of science, he has studied and published on the disruptive community conditions that create scientific revolutions. More recent work has involved the open source community, as editor for Morgan Kaufmann Publishers covering operating systems and web technology, then as Executive Editor for Open Source at O'Reilly, and as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Linux Technology. For the last six years he has worked with various dot-coms on tools for collaboration and online community building, including as part of the executive team managing top tier technology sites such as Slashdot (3.5 million page views per day served), and SourceForge.net (1 million registered users). As Director of Product Development for ManyOne Networks, he is currently working on the next evolution of online community, leveraging 3-D environments and new tools for knowledge management.

Danese Cooper recently joined Intel after six years as manager of Sun Microsystems' Open Source Programs Office. She was instrumental in Sun's adoption of the Sun Public License for NetBeans software, the creation of the Sun Industry Standards Source License and the new Joint Copyright Assignment, and in the adoption of a dual-licensing strategy, including selection of the GNU Lesser General Public License for OpenOffice.org.

Excerpted from Open Sources 2.0 by Chris DiBona, Mark Stone, Danese Cooper. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction

Chris DiBona,Danese Cooper, and Mark Stone

Midnight comes to the Nevada desert, and nothing is visible but a line of taillights ahead and a line of headlights behind.

"You ’ll see the lights from Gerlach first, and then Black Rock City," the driver says to the passenger. They drive another 20 minutes in silence before the highway crests a ridge line. On the horizon, the blackness is broken by a band of multicolored light.

"Is that Gerlach?" the passenger asks.

"No."The driver points to a small, dim cluster of yellow lights in the middle distance. "That ’s Gerlach. Way out there, those lights are Black Rock City. We ’re still about an hour away."

The passenger ponders this for a moment,then asks,"An hour?How big is it?"

"For one week each year, Black Rock City is the fourth largest city in Nevada. Population 30,000,give or take."

Gerlach rolls by,with its one bar,one gas station,and one motel.The caravan of cars bunches up after Gerlach.Then they turn off the highway,rumbling over the packed mud playa of the Black Rock Desert.Lights,neon,and thousands of RVs spread out before them.Music and drums —especially drums —can be heard in the distance. At the gate they ’re approached by someone who looks like a transplant from Mardi Gras:face paint,bright-colored suit,and a carnival hat. He checks their tickets and flashes them a big grin.

"Welcome to Burning Man!"

***

When the original Open Sources was published in 1999,it served mainly as an affirmation that open source existed.The book brought together the leading voices in open source, demonstrating that we were a community, that we were indeed a movement to be taken seriously. To put that time in context:

•Microsoft had,only a year earlier,leaked the "Halloween Memo,"its first semipublic acknowledgment that open source was a competitive threat.

•IBM had provided some initial backing for Apache, but had yet to announce its $1 billion Linux initiative.

•Linux was in only the 2.2 stage of kernel development.

•SourceForge.net was a relatively new site with only a few hundred projects hosted.

The mainstream press could not separate rising interest in open source from dot-com
bubble hype.The media took the surface ideas of Eric Raymond ’s The Cathedral & the Bazaar and created a caricature of legions of hobbyist programmers distributed across the globe, competing against the technology Goliaths of the day.That picture bore no more resemblance to reality than the tale of King Arthur does to the historical Middle Ages. Yet like any good mythology,it serves as a useful point of departure for understanding the real history from which it arose.

Today open source is an accepted fact of business life,with many companies engaged in core open source business models (Sleepycat,MySQL)or significant hybrid models blending open source and proprietary software (IBM,Novell,Red Hat).Many companies have striven to incorporate open source development into their range of software development practices —even Microsoft has projects hosted on SourceForge.net. How much do we really understand about the dynamics of open source software development or the communities that stand behind those projects?

The essays presented in this volume take a major step forward in our understanding since 1999,when the original Open Sources was published.

***

Burning Man is approaching its 20th anniversary.Conceived and inspired by Larry Harvey, it began in 1986 as a gathering of dozens of participants at Baker Beach in San Francisco.The centerpiece of the event was then,as it is now,the construction of a wooden effigy of a man,which is burned in celebration.

Celebration of what? The answer to that question may differ for every participant. The event was originally timed with the summer solstice —it ’s now held the week leading up to Labor Day —and has always had a pagan, tribal feel to it. Participants began bringing their own art projects, many of which were also burned in celebration at the climax of the event. By 1990 the gathering numbered in the hundreds, and even the unusually tolerant San Francisco police made it clear that the event needed to find another venue.

Burning Man then moved to its current location —the Black Rock Desert —an empty stretch of Nevada desert on federal Bureau of Land Management land, roughly two hours north of Reno.The extreme remoteness and the harsh environment have become an indelible part of the event. To be there, you have to really want to be there.

***

Mitchell Baker makes clear in her essay that part of the strength of the Firefox community is its size.Thousands of people have contributed to Firefox,a community of contributors larger than the core project leaders can really envision.Firefox seems very much like one of those mythical "legion of programmers "projects that comes to mind when people think of the metaphor suggested by Eric Raymond ’s The Cathedral & the Bazaar.

Yet the open source development model remains the most enigmatic aspect of the open source community.One striking and unexpected outcome of the years since the original Open Sources is how little technology companies have been able to leverage the open source development process.Projects such as Linux and Apache have had world-changing success,yet no commercial software company has been able to replicate this development process for its own products or its own success. AOL, for example, has never figured out how to integrate the Mozilla/Firefox developer community into its product development process.Sun has struggled to open up both Java and Solaris, and the jury is very much out on the success of those projects.

Read the essays here by Chris DiBona and Jeremy Allison and you will see how little proprietary software development differs from open source software development. The differences their essays suggest are subtle:an emphasis on knowledge reuse, not just code reuse;a recognition that open standards matter;and that architecture needs to be created with openness in mind.Why,though,are these and other open source lessons so hard for commercial companies to use?

Customer Reviews

Have the stamina for the second half
Finally I am half way through this book. I never read the first version but this one is certainly the FOSS world equivalent to War and Peace (which I have never read either).

The series of essays from the who's who of technology leaders in this space will not have you exercising any new found skills. No, it is not a practical book but it does have a way of making you feel more coherently informed. The authors introduction will strike a cord with any software developer. It certainly found empathy with me when it spelt out something I have long had a problem with: "[the] universal practice of .. a hiring agreement..[encompassing]..any and all code and inventions created by the employee..belong to the company".

There is some nice ammunition for analogies. Making a cake and disintermediating technology by Chris DiBona in Chapter two is one we might have thought ourselves but never have put so simply. Jeremy Allisons A Tale of Two Standards for Chapter 3 made me realise how long I have been in this industry. This is a walk from where I started in the late 80's crusading for Open Systems to where I hope I am not ending: with Open Source.

It was not all about beating the drum for open source. Ben Laurie's chapter 4 on Open Source and Security was very sobering and raised some home truths.

I tend to judge how well a book has impressed me by the amount of high light is spread across the pages. Mathew N. Asay's Chapter 7 with a long title was glowing in the dark because I liked it so much and Bruno Souza's Chapter 4 is the best argument for Java open source software I have read.

The second half of the book looks like it might be more academic but, if you read the first half early it will bring you bang up to date with current thinking in the open source world.

In conclusion, if you have the stamina there is a lot to benefit from but if you are looking for something practical from the book it must be in the second half.

Zeal replaced with wisdom in second volume of Open Sources
Open Sources 2.0 was compiled in 2000, focused on how business models and processes can be built from open source software. There is a very nice section on how businesses can combine open source and proprietary software to provide a complete solution.

What these essays lose in revolutionary zeal they gain in reasoned persuasion. The dialogue is different, the people writing the essays are writing for a much wider audience than the developer audience of the first book. For business decision makers Open Sources 2.0 is invaluable because it provides a great primer in how open source business works without the hype about an army of homebound coders working away for the good of software-kind.