Customer Reviews

The Success of Open Source

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I am a commercial software developer/manager who has often wondered about the broader motivations and implications of the Open Source movement, which is permeating many large patches of my industry. I found this book incredibly helpful in giving me the background I needed to understand the various Open Source products and articles I encounter day to day. Although my background is technical, this book generally is not. Although some technical information is unavoidable, Weber does a great job of maintaining his position as a professional political scientist and an informed layman on software technology. It may seem strange for a political scientist to approach this subject, but it turns out to be very beneficial because of the skill he has in analyzing organizations, their cultural, governmental, economic and societal impact. This isn't really a political science book; it is deeply about Open Source. But, Weber did manage to get me a little more interested in political science too.

Weber is a terrific writer. This is one of the best-organized, concisely written and cleanly reasoned books I have ever read. That said, this is not light reading; you will need to put your thinking cap on and think big thoughts with the author pretty frequently. This is exactly what I was looking for. There's plenty of shallow analysis out there concerning Open Source. What Weber provides is the cross-discipline perspective of a professional scholar who has studied Open Source carefully. I believe this book will prove useful to future historians when they want to understand the roots of Open Source, which, as Weber presents, could be very profound to our global economy and culture over decades to come.

The first chapter cleanly outlines the goals and big questions of the book. It also provides a primer on some of the main themes and terms such as the nature of property, what "free" means, current progress/status of Open Source etc. This brief chapter helps those who are very new to Open Source and sketches the trajectory of the rest of the book; just what you expect from a professional scholar.

Chapters Two through Four are about 30% of the book and chronicle the historic roots of Open Source (primarily the Unix community) through the past few decades of computing. The history comes right up to the present to show how what started as fits and spurts for decades, has now become the wildly successful realization of an unlikely vision; a phenomena in modern technological accomplishments. These chapters help the reader grasp the true vision of Open Source.

Chapter Five gathers hard data from surveys and empirical data from the online transcripts of Open Source projects to dissect the individual motivations of Open Source developers. There is very little guesswork here. Some of the myths about why the developers do what they do are dismantled and replaced with more intelligent information about their intricate motivations. Although I am not an Open Source developer, I have been a software professional for twenty years and worked with hundreds of other developers. Weber's sketch of the Open Source developer is very believable and resonates with many individual developers I have known.

Chapter Six studies the way the Open Source community, especially developers, organize themselves in various communities such as Linux, Apache and others. There are some good insights here for commercial teams to learn from.

Chapter Seven unfolds many legal implications around property rights, business models and specific case studies such as Red Hat, Debian and many others. This is great information and a unique contribution that is hard to find summarized as it is here.

Chapter Eight explores the long term potential for profound impact Open Source may have globally, politically and economically. There is also interesting analysis concerning how hierarchical organizations interface with networked (web) organizations. Finally, some suggestions for other fields of study that may copy the Open Source model are explored.

I do not think you will find a more helpful analysis for the non-technical aspects of Open Source. If I could give this book seven stars, I would.

By far it's the best study in open source I have read. Starting from social, political, and economical views, Steven Weber dissects the Open Source movement from a non-developer perspective. He goes beyond describing not only the origins and organization of the movement but also describing business models and roles that companies have been adopting to support and work with open source software.

"The Success of Open Source" is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand what is open source and its relevance for today's society.

I love this book. It is the book I wish I had written. You can sometimes tell it's written by someone who is not really a software development "native", but the economics and the Big Picture collaboration/cooperation stuff is spot on (and that's the whole point of this book, so...). I put little sticky notes on some of the pages because they were so pleasant to re-read. I had the sense that I was experiencing little epiphanies - perhaps these were just as the author intended. Get this book if you want a high-level, Big Picture coverage of the impact of open source and an overview of the relevant historical developments. -megan

I'm a commercial software developer, and found the author's history of the UNIX culture and the story of its evolution into what we now call Open Source to be fascinating. That alone made it a good read for me. Add in the thought provoking analysis of the "whys" (the real point of this book), and it's a killer combo.

Warning: the book is *full* of sentences like "Pluralism at many different levels is being enabled by communications technologies and by experimentation with property; together, these are reducing the marginal cost of adding voices toward an asymptote of zero." Despite that, I've been able to read it at the pace of a thriller, not a textbook.

I sat down intending to write Steven Weber a fan letter. (I decided to say it to you all instead.) I loved this book. I have 11 other books on open source, I wanted to learn everything I could because it's such a fascinating phenomenon. I thought I might even write about it. Never mind. Nothing I could write could touch this brilliant work. I had to work to read it. His range of subject matter was incredible. He talked computers like a hacker. He talked licenses like a lawyer. He talked economics like a business man. He talked business models like an entrepeneur or Venture capital investor. He told the history of open source like he was one of the voices of the movement. This book tells the whole story. In fields or industries I didn't know well, I had to google some stuff to grasp the entire meaning.He doesn't baby you. But, I loved that. I learned so much, I'm still bubbling with excitement. The book took two or three times longer to read than normal. But, I didn't want it to end. I've read over a hundred books this year. I've written some myself. Until today, I've never written a review. This book showed me how a book should be written. If you are seriously interested in the extraordinary story of open source, buy this book.

I bought this book out of curiosity, but it turned out to be an eye opener. The author analyses the topic from social science perspective and did a great job of doing that. He puts the success of open source on an analytical framework and tries to extrapolate its meaning beyond computer programming. I loved reading it and highly reccomend it.

Steven's book brings a rich articulation of the social practices innovations unleashed by the Open Source collective: a new understanding of private property that better fit the tech forces and the challenges of the present. His book it is not a model; it is not the list of the 10 reasons why...; it is not the defense of an emerging theory; but an historical account in which anecdotes, facts, historical moment, tentative hypothesis, set the background to allows the reader to reshape her/his own questions. The book gave me a perspective I have been testing with IT architects, programmers, software designers...I feel myself much more prepare to engage in conversations about the future in a meaningful and effective way. Thanks to the author!

For the serious reader (and who indeed thinks open source is hilarious?), Weber provides a detailed history of how this idea developed. He traces it from the advent of unix in the 1970s, and the generous (ie. low fees) licensing terms by ATT. Which led to the BSD Unix that flourished in the 80s. Also during this time, GNU took off.

But the bulk of the book deals with the 90s onwards. Especially as linux grew from Torvalds' seminal contribution. Its intellectual roots in unix and GNU are studied. We also see the rise of the Free Software Foundation and Apache, as articulate enablers and promoters of open source. All of which was aided by the invention and meteoric growth of the Web. This played a vital role in enabling a global audience of programmers to hear of and contribute their efforts.

The Success of Open Source in a not a just wistful paean to Linux as the title would suggest. Rather, it is two books in one.

The first book is one of the very best recapitulations of the open source movement and all of its predecessors. The second book is about how something that just seemingly shouldn't work, works so well, and how those principles behind its working extend to more than just the open source movement.

The author, a university professor, draws liberally from the traditions of historians, economists, sociologists, and psychologists to paint a compelling picture of why the forces behind open source are not going to go away any time soon. Read in best companion with The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which IS a bit of a wistful paean to Linux, it illuminates its subject wonderfully.

The author takes a Political Economics perspective that raises two important questions about Open Source:
1) Why do people participate without traditional incentive mechanisms (coercion and money)?
2) How does a largely unstructured mass produce a useful output, without the benefit of traditional coordination mechanisms (the firm and the market)?

The text includes a very interesting history of the Open Source movement. As a Business Analyst (BA), this was particularly interesting to me, because the focus is on the processes through which conflicts were resolved (or not). Since all projects experience conflict over goals, choice of solutions, pace of progress, or personality (to name just a few), this presentation is relevant to just about any project (not just open source projects).

Ultimately the author generates a picture of an alternative organizing principle (or set of principles) that underlies successful initiatives operating in conditions that characterize Open Source projects. As a BA, with interests in process in general, not just in software development processes, the larger ramifications of this alternate organizing principle are quite interesting. For example, at one point the author considers religious traditions as comparable to open source code bases. The comparison works because most religions have been re-organized as access to some body of wisdom literature, making them "non-excludable and non-rival" (as opposed to access to e.g. religious ceremony). That is, anybody who wants to read the Gospels or the Upanishads can, and their reading does not preclude another individual from reading the same source. This has consequences for the organization of the religious community -- in fact the same consequences faced by the open source community (and especially its leadership).

At another point the author maps open source organizational style to the field of International Relations, finding it useful to contrast a "network" organizational style with the traditional "hierarchy" organizational style that formal governments share with the Firm (the closed-source analogue). Particularly interesting is the insight that the space in which organizations of the two styles interact is unmapped, yet vital to emerging conditions in the 21st century.

I think this book will appeal to many different audiences for very different reasons. If you want a better understanding of the history and social dynamics, I highly recommend this book. For BAs looking for something they can immediately apply in the realm of proprietary (hierarchically organized) initiatives, there are other texts available. However Project Managers, who often need to operate without direct supervisorial authority, despite the larger organization's hierarchical structure, should find the discussion of the nature of open source leadership (along with the case studies of its success and failure) quite helpful in their own work.