For Fun and Profit
Title | For Fun and Profit PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher Tozzi |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 335 |
Release | 2024-04-09 |
Genre | Computers |
ISBN | 0262551780 |
The free and open source software movement, from its origins in hacker culture, through the development of GNU and Linux, to its commercial use today. In the 1980s, there was a revolution with far-reaching consequences—a revolution to restore software freedom. In the early 1980s, after decades of making source code available with programs, most programmers ceased sharing code freely. A band of revolutionaries, self-described “hackers,” challenged this new norm by building operating systems with source code that could be freely shared. 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.
For People, Not for Profit
Title | For People, Not for Profit PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas Martorelli |
Publisher | Author House |
Pages | 356 |
Release | 2012-06-12 |
Genre | Health & Fitness |
ISBN | 1477216995 |
Thomas Martorellis For People, Not for Profit tells the story of Fenway Healths growth from a small, volunteer-run walk-in clinic to an international leader into an international leader in care and research for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community and people living with HIV/AIDS. It is also the story of the tremendous societal changes that drove and affected that growth. The community activism and volunteer collectives of the 1970s; the devastation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic which emerged in the 1980s; the LGBT civil rights movement that gained strength and momentum through the 1990s; and the advances in research and advocacy that have brought so many health care and civil rights victories in the 2000s its all there. At the same time, Martorelli tells us Fenways story through the voices of the people who were and are still a part of this incredible organization from the early ups and downs through Fenways growth into one of the largest LGBT health organizations in the world.
Race for Profit
Title | Race for Profit PDF eBook |
Author | Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor |
Publisher | UNC Press Books |
Pages | 364 |
Release | 2019-09-03 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1469653672 |
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.
Against the Profit Motive
Title | Against the Profit Motive PDF eBook |
Author | Nicholas R. Parrillo |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 582 |
Release | 2013-10-22 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0300187300 |
In America today, a public official's lawful income consists of a salary. But until a century ago, the law frequently authorized officials to make money on a profit-seeking basis. Prosecutors won a fee for each defendant convicted. Tax collectors received a cut of each evasion uncovered. Naval officers took a reward for each ship sunk. The list goes on. This book is the first to document American government's "for-profit" past, to discover how profit-seeking defined officials' relationship to the citizenry, and to explain how lawmakers-by banishing the profit motive in favor of the salary-transformed that relationship forever.
Penology for Profit
Title | Penology for Profit PDF eBook |
Author | Donald R. Walker |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2000-06 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9781585440436 |
Before the discovery of oil and the advent of Progressivism to Texas, the state dealt with prison overcrowding by leasing convicts and their labor to private industry and funneling the profits into the state's coffers. In this book, Donald R. Walker examines economic, social, and political aspects of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Texas that resulted in the leasing system and its eventual demise. Convict leasing resulted in high mortality rates among prisoners, and stories of abusive guards and intolerable conditions were common. Blacks, who lacked social standing, legal counsel, and the rights to vote, testify, and sit on juries, made up a disproportionate amount of the prison population and were usually sent to work in the fields. In the twentieth century, revenues from the oil industry eased the financial woes of the state, and a movement for social reform gained momentum. Investigative journalism revealed to the public the abuses of prisoners, and in 1912 the state retook control of the prison system. Relying mainly on primary sources, including eyewitness accounts from prisoners, prison records, private correspondence, and newspaper accounts, Walker gives details and statistics of prison management in Texas during that era that will interest scholars of corrections management, Texas, black history, and the South.
Good Profit
Title | Good Profit PDF eBook |
Author | Charles G. Koch |
Publisher | Crown Currency |
Pages | 290 |
Release | 2015-10-13 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 1101904143 |
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Learn how to apply the principles of Charles Koch’s revolutionary Market-Based Management® system to generate good profit in your organization, company, and life “This book helps show you the way to good profit—whether you work for an international supermarket chain, a medium-sized regional business, or your own start-up.”—John Mackey, co-founder and co-CEO, Whole Foods Market The technological innovations, extreme politics, civil unrest, cyber attacks, demographic shifts, and global pandemic that have affected all businesses since this book was published have only confirmed Charles Koch’s belief that “the only reason a business should exist (and the only way it can legitimately survive long term) is to create value in a responsible way.” Hence, the principles in Good Profit are more important today than ever before. What exactly does Koch Industries, Inc., do and why is it so remarkably profitable? Koch’s name may not be on your home’s plywood, vehicle’s grille, smartphone’s connectors, or baby’s ultra-absorbent diapers but it makes them all. And Koch’s Market-Based Management® (MBM) system is what drives these innovations and many more. The core objective of MBM is to generate good profit. Good profit results from products and services that customers vote for freely with their dollars. It results from a bottom-up culture where employees are empowered to act entrepreneurially to discover customers’ preferences and the best ways to improve their lives. Drawing on six decades of interdisciplinary studies, experimental discovery, and practical implementation across Koch businesses worldwide, Charles Koch walks the reader through the five dimensions of MBM to show how to apply its framework in any business, industry, or organization of any size. Readers will learn how to: • Craft a vision for how to thrive in spite of increasingly rapid disruption and ever-changing consumer values • Select and retain a workforce possessing both virtue and talent • Create an environment of knowledge sharing that prizes respectful challenges from everyone at every level • Award employees with ownership and decision rights based on their comparative advantages and proven contributions, not job title • Motivate all employees to maximize their contributions by structuring incentives so compensation is limited only by the value they create A must-read for any leader, entrepreneur, or student, as well as anyone who wants a more civil, fair, and prosperous society, Good Profit is one of the greatest management books of all time.
The Profit of the Earth
Title | The Profit of the Earth PDF eBook |
Author | Courtney Fullilove |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 289 |
Release | 2017-04-18 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 022645486X |
While there is enormous public interest in biodiversity, food sourcing, and sustainable agriculture, romantic attachments to heirloom seeds and family farms have provoked misleading fantasies of an unrecoverable agrarian past. The reality, as Courtney Fullilove shows, is that seeds are inherently political objects transformed by the ways they are gathered, preserved, distributed, regenerated, and improved. In The Profit of the Earth, Fullilove unearths the history of American agricultural development and of seeds as tools and talismans put in its service. Organized into three thematic parts, The Profit of the Earth is a narrative history of the collection, circulation, and preservation of seeds. Fullilove begins with the political economy of agricultural improvement, recovering the efforts of the US Patent Office and the nascent US Department of Agriculture to import seeds and cuttings for free distribution to American farmers. She then turns to immigrant agricultural knowledge, exploring how public and private institutions attempting to boost midwestern wheat yields drew on the resources of willing and unwilling settlers. Last, she explores the impact of these cereal monocultures on biocultural diversity, chronicling a fin-de-siècle Ohio pharmacist’s attempt to source Purple Coneflower from the diminishing prairie. Through these captivating narratives of improvisation, appropriation, and loss, Fullilove explores contradictions between ideologies of property rights and common use that persist in national and international development—ultimately challenging readers to rethink fantasies of global agriculture’s past and future.