Literature Review - 'The Success of Open Source'

by Zanarama on Mon 09 September 2013 // Posted in legacy // under legacy foss@rit

So as a part of the HFOSS course we were assigned to read Chapter 3 of Steve Weber's 'The Success of Open Source'. This is just a brief rundown of the chapter and my thoughts.

Information

Author: Steve Weber

Title: The Success of Open Source, Ch. 3 What is Open Source and How Does it Work?

URL: http://hfoss-fossrit.rhcloud.com/static/books/Weber- SuccessofOpenSource-...

Publish Date: 2004

The Gist

This chapter details the how open source projects are developed from contributing to collaborating to decision making. It focused a lot on the Linux kernel and how it developed from having just Linus Torvalds contributing to having a large user/contributor base. The chapter also explores FOSS software from an economic and social perspective often forgotten.

The Good

  • Breaking gender stereotypes "The fairy tale solution would be to place a brilliant young eccentric in an isolated basement room with a computer and lots of coffee and let her write software until the point of exhaustion." (59)

  • The metaphors were really interesting, especially comparing looking at the process of creating Ford cars and the process of making software

  • It wasn't preachy, that is, it didn't detail why you should always use FOSS things and why FOSS is better than anything else.

  • The discussion of of the T-shirts for contributing to projects reminds me a lot of Fedora Badges and the idea of motivating involvement through recognition

The Bad

  • Very long....I was not expecting it to be 40 pages

  • Some statements were absolutes about groups of people and probably overstatments.

  • Assumes a base level of knowledge about subjects that can leave the reader a little lost

The Questions

  • How accurate are the statistics about how much code is written in-house, for in-house and not sold or distributed? I would like to see how that has changed.

  • How has the voting/deciding on the code direction of a project changed? As the user/contributor case has grown, I am unsure if the voting systems discussed have gone unchanged.

  • How often does a fork become more popular than the orgin? How often does it branch off into something else entirely?

The Review

3/5 ***

This chapter provides an intesting insight into the growth and into the development and philosophy of FOSS. Its an interesting read for those with a general familiarity with FOSS or software development. It may be offputing to a newcomer with no experience with the subject. The information is also a bit outdated, and could use an update. Overall, I would recommend it, but you may need to do some extra research on your own while reading.