My friend is trying to convince the CEO of their tech company to become open source, he didn’t oppose just asked for stuff to read. Any recommendations for this purpose?
edit: thanks y’all for the great suggestions!
The cathedral and the bizarre by ESR is a must read. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
Cathedral and Bazaar is one of the classic essays. It’s available in book form too.
Free Software, Free Society from RMS is also a foundational text. It’s online, but you can buy a hardcopy as well.
I’m sure there are more up to date options, but those are the basics to get started.
Not trying to be that guy, but the founding idea of open source was to not have an ethos. The GNU project came with an ethos of something like community enablement, which not everyone liked, so the open source label was invented to describe an approach to software that had technical advantages but was ethos-free.
Anyway though, you might like “The Hacker Ethic” by Pekka Himanen, and (on the free software side) “Free Software, Free Society” by Richard Stallman. The latter is easy to find online but the former might be a bit obscure.
AOSA, The Architecture of Open Source Applications, is a technical book but a very good one.
Opensource is not much about ethics, it’s mostly about being practical/pragmatist. For ethics (aka, ideology) you may want to consider reading more about GNU philosophy which, as a non-dev myself, is the main reason why I switched from Mac to GNU/Linux a few years ago. Also, Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU, has published a few books whose PDF are available for free (printed version are not free).
