Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

Had reddit :)

That reminds me about the book:

Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution:

http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/

It is free to read at the above link. I had read many of the chapters some years ago. Pretty interesting stuff.

It consists of multiple chapters, each written by different well-known people associated with prominent projects from the open source movement, at a time when it was relatively new (1999).

The paragraphs that I remember the most from it are from this chapter:

Future of Cygnus Solutions

An Entrepreneur's Account

Michael Tiemann

(Cygnus Solutions was a company which initially ported and improved GCC and its toolchain to multiple Unix platforms, and made a business out of it, before open source was a gleam in many people's eyes. They did well and were acquired by Red Hat some years later.)

Here are the paragraphs:

[ Again, a quote from the GNU Manifesto:

There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction.

Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.

The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness.

Heavy stuff, but the GNU Manifesto is ultimately a rational document. It dissects the nature of software, the nature of programming, the great tradition of academic learning, and concludes that regardless of the monetary consequences, there are ethical and moral imperatives to freely share information that was freely shared with you. I reached a different conclusion, one which Stallman and I have often argued, which was that the freedom to use, distribute, and modify software will prevail against any model that attempts to limit that freedom. It will prevail not for ethical reasons, but for competitive, market-driven reasons.

At first I tried to make my argument the way that Stallman made his: on the merits. I would explain how freedom to share would lead to greater innovation at lower cost, greater economies of scale through more open standards, etc., and people would universally respond "It's a great idea, but it will never work, because nobody is going to pay money for free software." After two years of polishing my rhetoric, refining my arguments, and delivering my messages to people who paid for me to fly all over the world, I never got farther than "It's a great idea, but . . .," when I had my second insight: if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!

-F = -ma Isaac Newton

You'll never see a physics textbook introduce Newton's law in this way, but mathematically speaking, it is just as valid as "F = ma". The point of this observation is that if you are careful about what assumptions you turn upside down, you can maintain the validity of your equations, though your result may look surprising. I believed that the model of providing commercial support for open-source software was something that looked impossible because people were so excited about the minus signs that they forgot to count and cancel them.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. Victor Hugo

There was one final (and deeply hypothetical) question I had to answer before I was ready to drop out of the Ph.D. program at Stanford and start a company. Suppose that instead of being nearly broke, I had enough money to buy out any proprietary technology for the purposes of creating a business around that technology. I thought about Sun's technology. I thought about Digital's technology. I thought about other technology that I knew about. How long did I think I could make that business successful before somebody else who built their business around GNU would wipe me out? Would I even be able to recover my initial investment? When I realized how unattractive the position to compete with open-source software was, I knew it was an idea whose time had come.

The difference between theory and practice tends to be very small in theory, but in practice it is very large indeed. Anonymous

In this section, I will detail the theory behind the Open Source business model, and ways in which we attempted to make this theory practical.

We begin with a few famous observations: ]

And here is the full chapter by Tiemann:

http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.htm...

For the viewers following along at home, this passage summarizes why I found the book interesting in the first place:

"Organisms are not analogous to human-engineered machines [...] rather, they are characterized by developmental systems that are capable of accommodating quite a bit of disruption—be that from changes in the external environment (phenotypic plasticity) or from mutations in their genetic makeup (genetic homeostasis). This ability to accommodate is in turn made possible by the modular structure of the genetic-developmental system itself, which allows organisms to evolve new phenotypes by rearranging existing components. "

To which my emotional response at the time was, "Hey, human-engineered machines are becoming less like human-engineered machines in many of the same ways!"

And this bit was the part I found most interesting about this review:

" Inherited epigenetic variants can interact with their genetic counterparts to multiply by orders of magnitude the phenotypic variation available to natural selection, thereby expanding the mechanistic bases of evolutionary theoretical explanations and greatly increasing their plausibility as an account of life's diversity."

Huh. The analogous mechanisms for software seems like they may be those that don't get propagated by code per-se (but certainly affect it), like the surrounding community. I'll have to think about that some more (and probably eventually read additional Evo Devo books).