Author: Steve Weber

Title: The Success of Open Source

Chapter: 3 What is open source and how does it work?

URL: http://hfoss-ritjoe.rhcloud.com/static/books/Weber-SuccessofOpenSource-Chap3.pdf

Publishing Year: 2004

Summary:

This chapter is pretty much a history of open source, why it works, different success stories of open source projects, and tips on how to do open source.

The Good:

• I think it’s cool that Linus Torvald himself has the final decision on linux changes.
• Brookes’s law that the mythical man-moth where when you add more people to a project you spoil the broth is interesting. Adding N people to a project increases bugs by N^2.
• The author gives a lot of good advice about how open source works and how to make it better. A good example is when he talks about not reinventing the wheel every time you make a project.

The Bad:

• The author contradicts himself about whether you should or shouldn’t fork repositories
• He talks about a lot of history that I’m just going to end up forgetting
• If I could I would want to send a patch for this book to make it shorter.

The Questions:

• What ever happened to Minix?
• Why is Finland the largest contributor for Linux?
• Why does Linus Torvald still have so much power over Linux?

My Review:

The read to me is pretty boring overall, but they do put in some interesting facts about open source projects that happened in the past. 4.6/10