brainstorms

Tuesday November 15, 2005

OSS books as necessities...

two new OSS books arrived one after another. i have barely had a chance to skim them. i think karl fogel's producing open source software is very good. it covers [amongst other things] technical, social and financial infrastructure, project communications, release engineering, managing volunteers and choosing licenses. this is a somewhat flat book [important, hard-earned insights are not easy to spot within the text], and i get the strong sense that a more concise 100 page book is struggling to get out. from what i have sampled, i consider it required reading for all OSS starters, including some [cough] old hands. it is also available online, released under a CC attribution-sharealike license.

DiBona, Cooper & Stone (eds) volume open sources 2.0 is a large and mixed bag of essays. [danese's blog entry] i have dipped in here and there [i will admit to reading pamela jones's essay first - it is ok.] and so far find it very informative, but also somewhat flat. [perhaps it is the typeface, or the layout that is giving me that impression. there is a book design issue here. more on this anon]

[are these books printed on acid-free paper? they do not smell like it. sigh]