Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 22nd May 2009 13:58 UTC, submitted by shaneco
Keith Curtis worked at Microsoft for 11 years, coding on Windows, Office, and at Microsoft's research department, before leaving the Redmond giant. Call it a revelation, call it giving in to the devil's temptations, but he's now a complete open source and Linux advocate, and in his new book, "After the Software Wars", he explains why open source will prevail against Microsoft's proprietary model.
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Member since:
2007-04-23
There will always be proprietary software, and having worked with the Firefox codebase before I'm not sure I'd put it up as an example of good code. I think webkit (formerly KHTML) is a much better example if you really want a browser, but browsers aren't exactly models of clean design since the problem is so complex.
Interesting that you should compare firefox to webkit... firefox started life as a commercial product (netscape) which was open sourced as a big mass of very messy code... Webkit on the other hand was originally written as open source.
You can see the same where other commercial products have been opened up, like openoffice... Code that started life as OSS tends to be much cleaner, more manageable and easier to build.