Download PDF by Christopher Tozzi,Jonathan Zittrain: For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source

In the Nineteen Eighties, there has been a revolution with far-reaching outcomes -- a revolution to revive software program freedom. within the early Eighties, after many years of constructing resource code to be had with courses, such a lot programmers ceased sharing code freely. A band of revolutionaries, self-described "hackers," challenged this new norm by way of construction working structures with resource code which may be freely shared. In For enjoyable and Profit, Christopher Tozzi bargains an account of the loose and open resource software program (FOSS) revolution, from its origins as an vague, marginal attempt through a small workforce of programmers to the common advertisement use of open resource software program this present day. Tozzi explains FOSS's ancient trajectory, formed via eccentric personalities -- together with Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds -- and pushed either through ideology and pragmatism, by means of enjoyable and profit.Tozzi examines hacker tradition and its impact at the Unix working process, the response to Unix's commercialization, and the background of early Linux improvement. He describes the industrial increase that undefined, whilst businesses invested billions of greenbacks in items utilizing FOSS working structures; the next tensions in the FOSS circulate; and the battles with closed resource software program businesses (especially Microsoft) that observed FOSS as a possibility. ultimately, Tozzi describes FOSS's present dominance in embedded computing, cellular units, and the cloud, in addition to its cultural and highbrow influence.