Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg

This book chronicles the development of the open source project Chandler. The journey was a tough one, with events and delays that resonate with seasoned software vets who worked on ambiguous projects before.

Entertainment wise, this book fell short for me. As contrasted with Masters of Doom, where you could feel the thrill of the ups and downs of ID software, this book had no such rides, only anguish every time the project estimate increased yet another year. Not entertaining, but accurate.

What lessons can we extract from this book? Linus did not release Linux until he had something concrete and working. Sure it only worked on certain platforms and was probably buggy, but the initial work was all his own, and it was enough to reveal his vision for other developers to contribute. From the get go, this project was developed as a team. Each fundamental decision was laid out in advance. Maybe it would have been better to pay independent OSS developers on their own time. And only organize a project once they had something to show off their visions.

3/5 stars.