Under the Radar: How Red Hat Changed the Software Business and Took Microsoft by Surprise

This is a book with a strong financial orientation since it really aims to detail circumstances leading to Red Hat's IPO. Consequently, those not interested in corporate Angel investing and creation funding for new companies will not see the merits of the book, and will find it very hard to get past the initial chapters, which deal with the financial perspective. Technology is covered from a historical perspective of generalities, such as the fragmentation of Unix, forking projects, source contr [...]

UPDATE 03/02/2010Great stuff about the first few rounds of capital and the battle to get a piece of those early rounds. Including Intel's insistence that they not get forced to wait for a later round.Very readable. Covering a lot of elapsed time, but yet a fair amount of detail revealed. Especially the key people involved.----As Young points out in the first few pages, this book is not about technology. It is about a business model. "Selling" free software. More nuggets as I uncover them.

This only took a couple of (delayed) train journeys to read. It's a succinct presentation of how Young believes that the growth and investment in Red Hat in the mid-late 1990s is a validation of the "open source business model". There's really interesting information about the involvement of Intel, the Microsoft DoJ case and the parallel release of Netscape's source. On the other hand, the book is ignorant of the industry context, and the general ease with which anyone in tech could ask for mone [...]

I read this right after reading Behind the Cloud - two different game changing business models and two very different individuals. I'd say this book is less polished, but I also feel Young is more self aware than Benioff is in his book. The marketing veneer was off and Young openly discussed the business model, how it affected others (not just his customers,) and the many challenges the open source movement has had. You have to be interested in the concept of open source and the challenge it set [...]

Whilst mainly about Red Hat's creation, it's got some nice background on Linus, RMS, GPL vs MPL and the like.A bit dated now, as it was released in 1999 and a lot has changed since then ("Java Script [sic] was a non-starter on the server side and what we should have done is got behind Perl in a significant way" - oh how the tables have turned!), it's still a great origin story of Unix, the companies it helped establish, how to make money selling OSS and the GPL vs Proprietary debate.