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In For Fun and Profit, Christopher Tozzi offers an account of the free and open source software (FOSS) revolution, from its origins as an obscure, marginal effort by a small group of programmers to the widespread commercial use of open source software today. Tozzi explains FOSS´s historical trajectory, shaped by eccentric personalities - including Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds - and driven both by ideology and pragmatism, by fun and profit. Tozzi examines hacker culture and its influence on the Unix operating system, the reaction to Unix´s commercialization, and the history of early Linux development. He describes the commercial boom that followed, when companies invested billions of dollars in products using FOSS operating systems; the subsequent tensions within the FOSS movement; and the battles with closed source software companies (especially Microsoft) that saw FOSS as a threat. Finally, Tozzi describes FOSS´s current dominance in embedded computing, mobile devices, and the cloud, as well as its cultural and intellectual influence.

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Christopher Tozzi is Assistant Professor of History at Howard University and a freelance writer. He is the author of Nationalizing France´s Army: Foreign, Black, and Jewish Troops in the French Military, 1715 - 1831.

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