Product: 0066620732

I picked up this book thinking that somehow it would show how good open source is only to find it’s pretty bad.
The book itself doesn’t even read like a book but more like a magazine article that’s 210 pages too long.
For example 95% of the book is Linus writing it. The other 5% is just comments while writing it by David.
Also after reading the end (the book can be skimmed and read in under 3 hours) Linus tells much more about himself then he thinks he does. It’s obvious that he does have a left wing stance that could be leftover from his father being a communist. Prochoice, anti gun ownership etc.
But getting to Linux itself he thinks more of just because it’s free it means it’s good. I’ve tried Caldera and Suse Linux and neither one worked. They partioned the hard drive and one did install but later was not found.
He can claim it can take over Windows (I’ll give it windows NT for the time being) but unless it’s made easier and with a better GUI then it won’t get as far as he wants. People do not want to go back to the days of command lines again. Also now that P2P makes everything free what’s the point of even having more than one software company on Linux? If applications can be downloaded for free how are Linux companies going to make money?
There’s nothing wrong with having things for free but down the line when the bills need to be paid you have to charge something.
The main problem I see is for home users. If their comptuer comes with an OS why would someone want to switch only to find that not all of their current apps will work? Look at what happened the the great late BeOS…
I’m still looking forward to using a newer version of Linux in the future (probably red hat)
Rating: 2
0066620732
Count: 36