Lit Review: What Is Open Source and How Does It Work?

This is a literature review on Chapter 3 of the book "What Is Open Source?" that is written by Steven Weber. The book is published in 2004. The book describes the establishment of open source and how it has evolved over the past fifteen years.

Weber used many statistics describing how the population of the contributor rapidly increased along the way. Additionally, he made his point that a good project does not come off from one person's mind. "The key element of the open source process, as an ideal type, is voluntary participation and voluntary selection of tasks." This is the most interesting line to me throughout the reading. I believe this is the core of the whole open source process - there must be something attractive to people that keeps them from working on these projects.

Goods:

1. The book (specifically chapter 3) is generally straight and forward. Weber did a good job explaining how things have evolved throughout the years without making the connections between each projects too complicated.
2. Used many statistics to proof his point such as the rapid growth and strong background of open source projects.
3. Provided a good reason of why people are voluntary involved into these project. Reasons include: attractive and motivative projects, challenge for all of the programmers and etc.This answers my question such as why payback would people contribute to projects without asking for paybacks - I was quite impressed by such the passion of these contributors.
4. Situating everything into "problems" and described how everything is been "solved". Additionally, Weber introduced the people who contributed to the projects. It's nice to know the big problems we had back in the day and people who made some big steps to contribute.

Bads:

1. The book focused too much on some of the big projects such as Linux
2. Weber included too much background stories for each projects / contributors which is relatively boring.History is clearly not the case for a industry (industry?) that evolves in such a fast speed.
3. Should focused more on how things are been solved instead of why they should be solved.This greatly slows down the pace of the book.
4. Since this book is published in 2004, many information are now outdated. This is however not a criticize of the book though.

Overall the book is interesting and fun to read. The proof and stories about the projects, people and phenomenons are all solid, supportive and real.A great introductory book for open source software.