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.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
Free Software as already killed many commercial entity ...
By offering better solution at cheaper price that evolve and meet the need of clients.
Actually Money don't talk at all , to give a good example Google as been spending far less then Microsoft on it's search engine and solution , they just offer a better product that people wnat and like to use.
Member since:2007-01-18
Free software hasn't killed anything. It created competition and some companies failed because of it. Now if open source code was allowed to proliferate into closed programs with the original creators banking on the idea that they could reap reward from it then I would agree that free software 'kill' it's competition and frankly open source software would be no better than Microsoft in that sense.
As for money. I wasn't talking about what companies were spending. I was talking about what consumers where spending. Money talks and BS walks. Consumers in general I think prefer not to spend money. It's now a proprietary software companies job to justified why consumers should buy their product over say a free alternative.
Member since:2009-05-19
Communism functions quite well in a lot of places, like your family. It requires certain enforceable constraints and ultimate trust backing them.
Member since:
2007-01-18
Free software won't kill anything. However, it does force change. It's forced Microsoft to compete again and as a result they have started producing better stuff.
Of course money talks and BS walks. What Microsoft has to do know is prove that buying their software has more benefit that simply using free software. Of course they also heavily target schools and developers so that helps them.
Communism does seem to function better in the open source world better than it did in the government world, but even then it takes people forcing the issue to keep it that way.