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For Fun and Profit - A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution (Hardcover)
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For Fun and Profit - A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution (Hardcover)
Series: History of Computing
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The free and open source software movement, from its origins in
hacker culture, through the development of GNU and Linux, to its
commercial use today. 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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