Understanding Open Source Software Development

ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This book marks the end of the beginning in our understanding of Open Source development. Until it appeared, all the attempts at a really comprehensive description of the phenomenon had come from Open Source hackers like myself, theorists operating from within the culture we were describing. ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We had the advantage of knowing our ground, but the disadvantage of knowing it perhaps too well. There are undoubtedly good questions we would never have thought to ask. That's why I've hoped from the beginning that an analytical literature about open source, independent of the Open Source community itself, would evolve. ALIGN="JUSTIFY">While other outside analysts and academics have tackled specific subtopics, Joe Feller and Brian Fitzgerald have given us the first book-length attempt that I am aware of to marshal approaches from multiple disciplines (software engineering theory, sociology, business analysis) into a portrait of the whole. ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This book is not the last word; last words are about dead things, and Open Source development is quite lustily alive, But it is an important step along the way, answering some questions and raising others that will continue to be live and fruitful research topics. ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Welcome to the conversation! ALIGN="RIGHT">Eric S. Raymond ALIGN="RIGHT">http://www.tuxedo.org/?esr/ 0201734966P12142001