I too would like to see reasons for liking or not liking the book, not just a blanket "I liked it"/"I didn't like it" response.
I thought the book was fine until chapter 11, then it took a turn that I thought was unfair to both the treatment of the subject matter and the reader that had been reading everything in the book up to that point. Chapters 12 and 13 didn't go so well for me either. As Williams claims, there were things in the book I did not know before—information I definately would not have found on any website search and much that I'm willing to take on faith. The book is not typo-free, but it was wisely published under a license that allows modification and republication, so these things can be easily fixed. I was editing as I was reading, so I've made a number of changes and I have some more planned (all aimed at making it easier for the online reader to read), but there are some large problems towards the end and I'm not sure how to best address them.
Chapter 11 is about the open source movement. Many of the points raised in this chapter deserve rebuttal from a freedom-minded perspective and none are published. The lack of examination is unfair to RMS and unfair to the reader who is learning about free software. It was disappointing to read the author buy the open source line of selling free software with a different face, since a closer inspection reveals that is not what open source does. At the least, Perens resigning (which I don't recall reading anything about in the popular free software press, and there's no pointer to a source on this) is a big hint that the open source movement is selling a different message. Williams missed a golden opportunity in this chapter to make copyleft pay off—he had already introduced the concept and copyleft is very useful to explain what's really going on with open source, but nothing of the kind is in there. If any book needs such a comparison, it's this book.
Chapter 12 stuck out for me because it, unlike the other chapters in the book, bore so little fruit. It didn't really dawn on me why the chapter was in there at all until I read chapter 13 (which I'll describe shortly). At best, it seemed like a drawn-out way to say "RMS doesn't suffer fools lightly." and that's about it.
Chapter 13 has good information, but it's coming from RMS quotes. Many people are eager to buy into the idea that when someone is acting irrationally, it's okay to dismiss everything they say or do as irrational. Therefore, reading chapters 12 and 13 in that order, one is likely to come away thinking the Torvalds-is-no-free-software-leader argument is fatally flawed just because it comes from RMS (who, for lack of a better term, "lost his cool" in the car trip in chapter 12). In a biography, events and ideas described by the author carry a weight no quoted participant can match. Unless you know something about the events from outside the book, there's a good chance the reader will come away thinking Linus Torvalds is worthy of leader status for more than just the Linux kernal. It would be unfortunate if anyone were to come away thinking that.
There are some other relatively minor problems I have in other areas of the book, some of which follow on previously stated problems: things presented as fact without any source (but this is thankfully rare), calling Torvalds apolitical when I think this book does a good job of defending the idea that his political stance is pragmatism instead, defending the use of the term "free software" instead of "open source" (Appendix A) strikes me as odd in that this is a bio of RMS so naturally it makes sense to describe what he made. If this was a bio of ESR or Bruce Perens instead, I'd expect different terms to be used depending on what stage of the subject's life was being discussed (there was a time when "open source" did not exist, "free software" has 13 years more use than "open source"). Calling free software "politically laden" strikes me as odd but perhaps calling it that is a side-effect of not really understanding what that movement is selling. Open source is politically laden too, the politics are different but they are there. I don't think anyone can truly be absent of politics, no matter how much they bill themselves as being somehow exempt from differences of opinion. The terms "free software" and "open source" are not interchangeable because they never speak to the same ideas. The need for a new term Christine Peterson writes about points to the difference in what is being discussed. After all, nobody goes out of their way to invent a term for describing something already named unless they're trying to distinguish their concept.
So, overall, I found the book was better in the beginning and middle than it was in the end. I'm not sure if my complaints about the book are easily fixed because it would require major changes to make the book flow well and still include pertinant input on what's going on from a freedom-minded perspective. I can't change the quotes, of course, so some would simply have to be omitted which could be undesirable too. I'm not sure how to best address my concerns with the book, so I'll have to think about it some more.
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