A decade of good books
It’s 2004. Google files its IPO. A group of undergrads launche
something called “The Facebook” at Harvard University. Apple’s most
popular pocket i-thing is years away from taking phone calls. A curious
new Linux distribution called “Ubuntu” appears.Opensource.com doesn’t exist. It won’t for another six years.
Tech-savvy readers hungry for open source stories subscribe to another publication: Red Hat Magazine. That publication is actually the product of a marriage between two others: Under the Brim, a digital newsletter Red Hat launched in 1999, and Wide Open Magazine, a short-lived glossy in the same vein.
And something else appears online: the first recorded instance of the open source summer reading list.
A decade-old reading list runs the risk of seeming quaint, even
naive. A proper dose of hindsight might make the issues it addresses
feel old-fashioned. But the 2004 open source summer reading list is
remarkable for just how relevant its entries remain today. Eric
Raymond’s oft-cited The Cathedral and the Bazaar is there, then
only three years old. Guides for learning new computer skills—like
Linux router maintenance, programming in Python, and utilizing UNIX—are
as crucial today as they ever were. The list’s only work of fiction,
Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, continues to delight. Open
source communities might embrace blindingly rapid development, but the
ideas that galvanize and drive them haven’t change much in the last ten
years.If the open source summer reading list is even older than
Opensource.com itself, then the values that inform it are older still.
Another decade of wonderful books won’t change them.