For Fun and Profit
eBook - ePub

For Fun and Profit

A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

For Fun and Profit

A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution

About this book

In the 1980s, there was a revolution with far-reaching consequences—a revolution to restore software freedom. In the early 1980s, after decades of making source code available with programs, most programmers ceased sharing code freely. A band of revolutionaries, self-described "hackers," challenged this new norm by building operating systems with source code that could be freely shared. In For Fun and Profit, Christopher Tozzi offers an account of the free and open source software (FOSS) revolution, from its origins as an obscure, marginal effort by a small group of programmers to the widespread commercial use of open source software today. Tozzi explains FOSS's historical trajectory, shaped by eccentric personalities—including Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds—and driven both by ideology and pragmatism, by fun and profit.

Tozzi examines hacker culture and its influence on the Unix operating system, the reaction to Unix's commercialization, and the history of early Linux development. He describes the commercial boom that followed, when companies invested billions of dollars in products using FOSS operating systems; the subsequent tensions within the FOSS movement; and the battles with closed source software companies (especially Microsoft) that saw FOSS as a threat. Finally, Tozzi describes FOSS's current dominance in embedded computing, mobile devices, and the cloud, as well as its cultural and intellectual influence.

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Information

Publisher
The MIT Press
Year
2017
Topic
Computer Science
eBook ISBN
9780262341189
Subtopic
Computer Science General
Index
Computer Science

Table of contents

  1. CoverImage
  2. Half Title
  3. Series Page
  4. Title
  5. Copyright
  6. Table of Contents
  7. Foreword
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. Introduction
  10. Chapter 1: The Path to Revolution: Unix and the Origins of Hacker Culture
  11. Chapter 2: Inventing the Foss Revolution: Hacker Crisis, GNU, and the Free Software Foundation
  12. Chapter 3: A Kernel of Hope: The Story of Linux
  13. Chapter 4: The Moderate Foss Revolution
  14. Chapter 5: The Foss Revolutionary Wars: Free Software, Open Source, and Microsoft
  15. Chapter 6: Ending the Foss Revolution?
  16. Notes
  17. Glossary
  18. Bibliography
  19. Index

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Yes, you can access For Fun and Profit by Christopher Tozzi, Thomas J. Misa,William Aspray in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Computer Science & Computer Science General. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.