For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution by Christopher J. Tozzi (review)

The term "free and open source software" (FOSS) does not primarily refer to software written for a specific application or to a particular approach to software production, but rather to the manner of its distribution. Typically, FOSS can be used, modified, and redistributed without the hindrance of, or payment to, its original authors. "Free" signifies liberty as well as the absence of cost, and "open source" means that the secrets of the software's code are exposed.

There has always been free software. Electronic computers were originally sold without software and users collaborated to exchange information and code, as the name of the 1950s IBM user group SHARE suggests. Software soon became commercialized, of course, but traditions of openness persisted, notably in universities. In the 1980s, largely due to the activities of MIT programmer Richard Stallman, a discourse of "free software" emerged in opposition to the perceived commercialization of hitherto widely available code, in particular the Unix operating system developed at Bell Labs. By the turn of the millennium, FOSS developers had created the GNU/Linux operating system and several other significant products. FOSS is now a crucial part of the networked world, providing both software—for example web servers, desktop environments, and the FOSS-derived Android operating system that powers the majority of the world's mobile phones—and many of the programming languages in which that software is written.

Tozzi describes this transformation as a "revolution" and uses this metaphor to structure his book. However, he does not mention Thomas Kuhn's 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or the voluminous literature inspired by it. Instead, the book uses a high-level schema derived from reflection on historical revolutions to structure the story of FOSS. For example, a chapter entitled "the Moderate FOSS Revolution" is associated with Louis XVI's acceptance of a constitutional monarchy in France in 1789 and the period between the March and October 1917 revolutions in Russia, with Tozzi commenting that "it is generally during the moderate stage that the most productive and enduring revolutionary changes arise" (p. 163). The use of this structuring device seems rather artificial and does not add much insight to the story of FOSS.

Tozzi begins his story with Unix, a system he describes as embodying much of the ethos of "hacker culture". He draws on Stephen Levy's book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984) to flesh out this rather vague notion, and in many ways Tozzi's book reads as an extension of Levy's narrative to the history of FOSS. A "crisis" in this culture (the word is not used in Kuhn's sense) caused by the attempted commercialization of Unix led uber-hacker Stallman to propose the term "free software" and to start an attempt to create a "free" version of Unix. In one crucial respect (the production of the so-called "kernel" of the system) this effort stalled, and only the efforts of a project initiated in 1991 by Finnish student Linus Torvalds enabled the production of a complete operating system, usually simply called Linux. The heroic exploits of Stallman and Torvalds are recounted in a chapter each and the book then follows the revolutionary script by describing, after the stage of moderate revolution, a period of "revolutionary war" characterized by infighting between proponents of different ideological approaches to FOSS and also between FOSS advocates and Microsoft. A final chapter surveys the successes of FOSS in the years since 2000.

Tozzi provides a lively and entertaining account of these developments, but much of the story is available in popular and journalistic accounts, and readers may be left feeling that an opportunity to dig deeper has been missed. Anxious to prevent the commercial capture of free software, FOSS developers have proposed a bewildering variety of licenses under which it can be distributed, and while Tozzi describes...