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The title of this page should probably be something like: comments on books on non-technical aspects of FLOSS (free/libre/open-source software). But "open books" is snappier and less cumbersome. Since FLOSS itself is a cumbersome term, I'll use "open source" instead, although I am aware of the objections to doing so. Since the focus is on non-technical books, there is nothing here about Linux system management, or writing open-source applications, or anything like that.
Rather, this page is about books on non-technical aspects of open source, such as its history, and its implications for business, the economy, and society. There is a bias toward recent books, on this non-technical side as on the technical side, because open source is changing so rapidly. At the foot of this page, there is a "shelf" of half a dozen books. Between here and there, I'll go book by book. I intend to provide comments on more books than the half-dozen on the virtual shelf, but the current objective for this page is to get as far as commenting on each of the half-dozen. If you need a quick introduction to open source, I have one here.
If I were to recommend to the "general reader" one book on open source, it would be Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by the journalist Glyn Moody. It's well-researched, as well as easy to read. The hardback edition came out in 2001, and covered events up until the end of 2000.
The paperback edition came out in 2002, and includes an afterword, mainly describing the dot.com crash and its effects on open source. Here's a summary of the afterword. The burst of the dot-com bubble was traumatic for many (but not all) "pure play" open source firms. However, open source itself is vibrant. This is partly due to the nature of open source; no firm takes open source code down with it when it fails. Notable also is the increasing adoption of open source by large firms such as IBM.
The second book is more recent (2004) and more academic. It is The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber. Perhaps the best way quickly to give a flavor is to quote. "The conventional notion of property is... the right to exclude you from using something that belongs to me. Property in open source is configure fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude" (p. 1). Weber is interested in, and writes interestingly about, the political economy of open source.
I'd recommend starting with one or other of the above books, and then going to Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. This edited volume comprises pieces from many of the key players in the movement. For example, Richard Stallman writes about free software. Bruce Perens writes about the open source definition, and why he and others considered it necessary despite and because of the already existing free software movement. Other contributors include Linus Torvalds and Bob Young. It's one of the older books on the shelf, having been published in 1999, but at the same time it will be, for many people, the best second book on open source.
It's available online. So is the stuff collected in the Stallman and Raymond books we're about to come to. I won't attempt to link to every online location of books on this shelf, since I'm assuming that, if you're at this page about books, you're looking for an old-fashioned, dead-tree, book made of paper. That's certainly my preferred way of reading large chunks of text. But I will mention that there is a pretty good 100-page Open Source Reader available for free download in pdf format. It's more similar to Open Sources: Voices than to any other book on this shelf. It doesn't belong on the shelf, though, since you can't buy it as a good old-fashioned book.
The next couple of books stay with the idea that it's good to read stuff by some of the people directly involved in the movement. They are Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman and The Cathedral & the Bazaar, a collection of Eric Raymond's writings.
I also include on the open book shelf a book that says nothing directly about open source, but presents a view of innovation and competition very relevant to open source. This is The Innovator's Dilemma. Clayton Christensen writes about disruptive technologies that change industries. Some (including CC himself, judging from his comments on the back of The Cathedral & the Bazaar) regard open source as such a technology.
To cut the list off at six is rather arbitrary. So I'll mention a few other good books (and leave unmentioned many other books, some of which are also good). That is, I intend to do that when I update this page...
Finally, it's worth noting that some of these books are published by O'Reilly, a publisher that puts out a bunch of good books on open source and matters, has a fine web site, and does other good things.
So here is the shelf of half a dozen "open books" as of November 10, 2004:
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