I finished this book a little while ago and it is a must read for any open source enthusiast. It is a collection of essays from a number of well know names in the open source software movement. I found all of the essays very interesting to read and they fit together nicely as a cohesive work.

The essays together were structured in a way that tells a good bit of history of the computer industry at large and open source's influence throughout. Several the essays discuss open source as a successful business model, which I found particularly interesting. Leaders from companies like Red Hat discussed how they got started and managed to become profitable.

I also got a good perspective on the foundations of open source ideals and what events in history led up to the creation of things like the GNU project and the GPL.

The thing I found most interesting was that most of the authors made predictions for the future of open source in their writing and I got to see what the mentality for the movement was at the time. With me reading it nine years or so later I could gauge how these predictions were panning out and what common threads there are in today's open source mentality. It was about half and half on the predictions I thought. Half had been (or were well on there way to being) realized and the other half had yet to come.

There is a follow up book to this and I am looking forward to getting into it as soon as my reading list lightens up a little.

DiBona, C., Ockman, S., & Stone, M. (1999). Open sources: voices from the open source revolution. Beijing: O'Reilly.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40889566