Topic: After the Software Wars

[Nemesis]

After the Software Wars

Keith Curtis, who worked at Microsoft for 11 years as a programmer, recently wrote "After the Software Wars," a defense of open source software. It's available for download and also as a paperback on Lulu.com. Curtis and I corresponded via e-mail several weeks ago:

The key to faster technological progress is the more widespread use of free software ... Computers are an advancement whose importance is comparable to the invention of the wheel or movable type. While computers and the Internet have already changed many aspects of our lives, we still live in the dark ages of computing because proprietary software is still the dominant model.

On why he decided to write the book: I was inspired to write the book after I left (Microsoft) and just decided to stick in a Red Hat Fedora Core CD, just to see how the other half lived.