For Fun and Profit. A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution

In the 1980s, there was a revolution with far-reaching consequences – a revolution to restore software freedom. Whereas programmers had freely shared source code for decades, this practice came to an end in the early 1980s. A band of revolutionaries, self-described “hackers,” challenged this new norm by building operating systems with source code that could be freely shared. In his book, Christopher Tozzi tells the story of this revolution – from its beginnings as an obscure project by a handful of enthusiasts to its widespread commercial success today – and shows the path of development of free and open software, which was shaped by prominent figures such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds and was driven by ideology, pragmatism, the desire to create for the sake of enjoyment, and the pursuit of profit.