A landmark anthology published by O'Reilly in 1999, edited by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone. The book collected essays from major FOSS figures at the precise moment the movement was naming and defining itself: contributors included eric-raymond, linus-torvalds, richard-stallman, larry-wall, bruce-perens, and others.
Historical Position
The anthology appeared at the hinge point of open-source-schism-and-dotcom-1998-2004. The term "open source" had been coined just the previous year at foresight-open-source-meeting-1998. The osi-founding-1998 had just occurred. netscape-source-release-1998 had demonstrated that FOSS ideas could influence a major corporation. The book captured the movement's self-understanding at this singular moment — before the dot-com boom's full effect, before Linux achieved mainstream server status, before the governance models had settled.
Contents and Significance
The anthology is significant less for any individual essay than for what it reveals about the movement's internal pluralism. Readers encounter richard-stallman insisting on the ethical foundations of free software — four-freedoms, copyleft, the primacy of user freedom — alongside eric-raymond's methodological pragmatism and linus-torvalds' disinterest in ideology. The philosophical tensions that define software-freedom-vs-open-source are on display in a single volume, without editorial resolution.
Bruce Perens contributed an explanation of the open-source-definition he had drafted for the open-source-initiative. Larry Wall's essay brings the perspective of the Perl community, representing a tradition of open development that predated the "open source" label.
Value as Historical Source
The book functions as a primary source for the movement's 1999 self-image. It is not a critical history; the editors were participants, not observers. But that insider status makes it irreplaceable: it shows what the founding figures thought mattered, how they framed the movement to outsiders, and where they disagreed. The success-of-open-source-weber-2004 and other secondary sources analyze the movement from outside; this anthology lets the participants speak.
The implicit tensions in the collection — between freedom and pragmatism, between community and commerce, between the GPL tradition and permissive licensing — remained unresolved in 1999 and remain contested today. See software-freedom-vs-open-source for the conceptual map.