Book Review

This is the first review for this new section.
Why don't you give it a try and write some lines about a book you really find interesting and well written or very informative?
You can send me your review or ask eva for a cvs access and hack that page yourself ;-)

Rebel Code

by Glyn Moody

Rebel code is a comprehensive overview of the free software movement, starting with pioneers like Richard Stallman and covering events up until late 2000. The book is not limited to the story of Linux but covers also the development of Apache, the Gimp, Perl, Sendmail, the XFree project, etc. Note: the book is written in English but you can find a german version at: Lehmanns Online Bookshop (LOB) or www.buecher.de

Contents of the book
The book starts in 1984 with Richard Stallman's GNU project. Then it covers the birth of Linux with some amusing facts like Linus Torlvalds saying the kernel should be called "buggix"!
We discover major projects connected to the development of Linux and some anecdotes concerning people behind those projects. The book then explains the reasons for various Linux distributions (some of them being already dead). By the way, do you know where the name "Debian" comes from?
The various types of licensing agreements are covered as well as the two projects GNOME and KDE and why. We learn that Linus preferred KDE in 1998 :-) but he uses neither KDE nor GNOME.
The growth of the Internet played a big part in the development of all those projects and vice-versa and the methodology of projects is very well analyzed.

The author often inserts parts of interviews with people and that makes the book very lively and not at all boring.

Above all, the book is about the conflict between the profit motive and big business and the belief that the chance to develop and improve software is a freedom. I liked to read that countries like China or India will provide the next generation of hackers.

My point of view
I was hooked to the book and now I understand really better the philosophy behind open source. You can read that book as easily as you would read a fiction. The author included some extracts of the email messages sent to Usenet groups and analyzes well the intentions of people. I found the chapter called "Free the lizard" about Netscape and Mozilla difficult to understand but the rest of the book is really very easy and entertaining. I am not an English native speaker but yet I had no problem to read that book. I learnt a lot about Open Source, true hackers and in the end of the book, I feel honored to play a small part in that "bazaar".

Review by annma

[ Edit ]