Finally, Tozzi describes FOSS's current dominance in embedded computing, mobile devices, and the cloud, as well as its cultural and intellectual influence. As someone who didnt know much about FOSS and only started getting into it recently, it was nice to have the history laid out. He describes the commercial boom that followed, when companies invested billions of dollars in products using FOSS operating systems the subsequent tensions within the FOSS movement and the battles with closed source software companies (especially Microsoft) that saw FOSS as a threat. For Fun and Profit by bc-os » Sat 8:58 pm I just finished a book about Free and Open Source software: 'For Fun and Profit' by Christopher Tozzi I actually really liked it. Tozzi explains FOSS's historical trajectory, shaped by eccentric personalities-including Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds-and driven both by ideology and pragmatism, by fun and profit.Tozzi examines hacker culture and its influence on the Unix operating system, the reaction to Unix's commercialization, and the history of early Linux development. In For Fun and Profit, Christopher Tozzi offers an account of the free and open source software (FOSS) revolution, from its origins as an obscure, marginal effort by a small group of programmers to the widespread commercial use of open source software today. A band of revolutionaries, self-described “hackers,” challenged this new norm by building operating systems with source code that could be freely shared.

Revolutionary until the Peace: War and Political Culture in France, 1789-1815. For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open-Source Software Revolution (MIT Press, 2017). Manuscript awarded 2014 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize. In the early 1980s, after decades of making source code available with programs, most programmers ceased sharing code freely. 1831 (University of Virginia Press, 2016). The free and open source software movement, from its origins in hacker culture, through the development of GNU and Linux, to its commercial use today.In the 1980s, there was a revolution with far-reaching consequences-a revolution to restore software freedom.

For Fun and Profit by Christopher Tozzi