In addition to covering a history of free and open source, The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin explores how free and open software is changing the world. It is authored by Peter H. Salus, a noted UNIX, open source, and Internet historian and author of A Quarter Century of UNIX and Casting The Net and other books. Salus has interviewed well over a hundred key figures to document the history and background of free and open source software. In his book, Salus reaches back into the early days of computing, showing that even in "pre-UNIX" days there was freely available software, and rapidly moves forward to the Free Software movement of today and what it means for the future, drawing analogies and linkages from various aspects of economics and life.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By David Walden
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
No book can completely document all of the open source computer activities that have happened over that past decades. Other books go deeply into the philosophy of open source activities. This book provides relatively short summaries of many open source projects and threads them together in a relatively logical chain or network. The book is a good place to start if you are just learning about open source or weren't paying attention while the big open source change came upon us and now want to review.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By Bas Vodde
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
"The Daemon, The Gnu and the Penguin" is a short history of free and open (the author prefers free :P) software. Its written by 'the unix historian' Peter Salus, who has been around and has been an active part of this history. There are probably not much other people who would be more suitable to write this book than Peter Salus.
The book is quite thin (about 200 pages) and contains quite many chapters (30). The book is not following the history chronologically but neither is it totally random. It dives into one 'track' of the history, then comes back and shows how the different tracks have influenced each other. Each chapter is an essay which can be read independently. The book is feels exceptionally well researched and the author does not shy away from giving his opinion on the topic. Although, the last few chapters of the book were perhaps a little too anti-Microsoft (plus the predictions on Windows 7 can probably be exclaimed wrong).
The chapters are too many to all cover in this review. The book covers a history of unix from the perspective of one of the first Open Source applications and one of the first clashes with lawyers about openness of source code. It covers the different unix clones and especially BSD unix and how it led to vi editor and relates to Sun Microsystems. It side-tracks in Richard Stallman, the creation of Emacs, the founding of FSF and the creation of the Gnu Public License. The book covers how Linux relates to all this and how the different Linux distributions started, how they related and what their influence was on the world of Open Source. It even dives into the, perhaps, failures of Hurd, BSDi, and Plan 9... which not much people know about. The book ends with broadly mapping the current state of Open Source and making predictions about its future.
Reading The Daemon, The Gnu, and The Penguin was fun and enjoyable. It wasn't always easy because a lot of content was covered in a short amount of time, the writing style was terse. Yet, I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of Open Source especially as its short, easy to read, and well researched. The rating would be between 4 and 5 stars, but decided to go for 4 because of the sometimes a little too terse writing style. Still, highly recommended!
The book is quite thin (about 200 pages) and contains quite many chapters (30). The book is not following the history chronologically but neither is it totally random. It dives into one 'track' of the history, then comes back and shows how the different tracks have influenced each other. Each chapter is an essay which can be read independently. The book is feels exceptionally well researched and the author does not shy away from giving his opinion on the topic. Although, the last few chapters of the book were perhaps a little too anti-Microsoft (plus the predictions on Windows 7 can probably be exclaimed wrong).
The chapters are too many to all cover in this review. The book covers a history of unix from the perspective of one of the first Open Source applications and one of the first clashes with lawyers about openness of source code. It covers the different unix clones and especially BSD unix and how it led to vi editor and relates to Sun Microsystems. It side-tracks in Richard Stallman, the creation of Emacs, the founding of FSF and the creation of the Gnu Public License. The book covers how Linux relates to all this and how the different Linux distributions started, how they related and what their influence was on the world of Open Source. It even dives into the, perhaps, failures of Hurd, BSDi, and Plan 9... which not much people know about. The book ends with broadly mapping the current state of Open Source and making predictions about its future.
Reading The Daemon, The Gnu, and The Penguin was fun and enjoyable. It wasn't always easy because a lot of content was covered in a short amount of time, the writing style was terse. Yet, I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of Open Source especially as its short, easy to read, and well researched. The rating would be between 4 and 5 stars, but decided to go for 4 because of the sometimes a little too terse writing style. Still, highly recommended!
By GROND
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
Easy to read, quite informative. If you're into UNIX and related systems, you should definitely read this. It doesn't take long, and is very fulfilling.
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