The book is quite thoughtful and offers something to every one ranging from economists to the people working in software business. Reviewed by:
The book “Perspectives on Free and Open source Software” is a compilation of distinguished works of many experts in their respective domains that defines “free and open source software” as the free use, modification and redistribution of software product. The book provides lots of quantitative and qualitative information to software engineers about “free and open source software” (F/OSS). The book provides provocative, exemplary research and thinking by the experts from various disciplines and F/OSS researchers. The book has been divided into five perspectives.
In the First Perspective, “Motivation in Free/Open Source Software Development” it has seen that large number of first time observers are troubled to find that large number of highly skilled software developers dedicate ample amount of time and efforts to the creation, expansion and ongoing maintenance of free products and services. However, it has been revealed that more than 60% of participants working in F/OSS projects found it to be most creative work of their life. They have cited that intellectual stimulation while coding, improving programming skills and ideological beliefs led them to work on these projects.
In the second perspective, “The Evaluation of Free/Open Source Software Development” the authors have tried to address the issues related to security, reliability, and maintainability etc on F/OSS process and products. The authors believe that there is unexamined hype which has been created about F/OSS and any implementation using F/OSS tools requires robust research and hard evidence. The book also discusses the quality of zOpen Source Software and studied implementation of TCP/IP on Linux. It says that the code was poorly documented with complex interfaces and stressed that design should be precise with up-to date description of architecture and interfaces. The book echoes that F/OSS has potential to be better than proprietary software. Five case studies have been evaluated to support this fact.
In third perspective, “Free/Open Source Software Processes and Tools” authors have studied two major F/OSS projects i.e. Apache Server and Mozilla to find out the capacity of F/OSS development. The book also looks at the development cycle of releases of FreeBSD OS and concludes that well defined software engineering process is needed for project success.
In fourth perspective “Free/Open Source Software Economic and Business Models”, it has been argued that F/OSS offers extraordinary examples of the power of user innovation independent of manufacturing firms. The book also presents a stimulation structure to describe the decentralized and micro-level decisions that allocate programming resources to F/OSS developers.
The fifth and final perspective,” Law, Community and Society”, presents research focused on legal, cultural and social issues. In the seven chapters under this perspective, authors have drawn a broad picture of social implications of F/OSS and have linked F/OSS model with the future of open society and free communication of ideas. Further, the complex issue of F/OSS licensing and copyright has been defined accurately and succinctly. Finally the authors present a thoughtful and informed essay on F/OSS as an expression of “commoditization of software”, “network enabled collaboration” and “software customizability (Software as a service)”. By examining next generation applications, we can begin to understand long term significance of the open source paradigm shift. If we have to benefit from “the revolution”, our understanding must penetrate the foreground elements of the free and open source movements and instead focus on its causes and consequences.