Monday, November 2, 2009

Keith Curtis After the Software Wars

Keith Curtis werkte tien jaar voor Microsoft en omarmde daarna gefrustreerd Open Source en Linux en schreef er een interessant boek over wat volgens hem de perspectieven zijn van vrije software. En hoe ze naar zijn idee sterker zou kunnen worden. Zijn invalshoek is vooral vanuit de programmeurs kant en gaat dan ook onder andere over de technische ontwikkeling van de programmeertalen die gebruikt worden.
The key to faster technological progress is the more widespread use of free software. Free versus proprietary (or non-free) software is similar to the divide between science and alchemy. Before science, there was alchemy, where people guarded their ideas because they wanted to corner the market on the means to convert lead into gold."
Je kunt het hier downloaden
Een uitgeschreven interview met de maker hier.

Een gesproken interview hier .

Hij ziet een probleem in het feit dat er te weinig betaalde programmeurs aan de ontwikkeling van vrije software werken. Een fragment, waar in hij het belang van de kwantitatieve toename van het aantal gebruikers benoemt:
Metcalfe's law says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. It has many implications. One of the most important is that Linux is not well supported by hardware and software vendors because there aren't as many Linux users. (Put another way, the square of the number of Windows users dwarfs the square of the number of Linux users.) This is a very difficult barrier.


Zijn visie op Windows 7 hier.
Een citaat:

"Some say that Microsoft is just a marketing company, but the fact that customers were unhappy with Vista proves that it is an engineering company, and when it does a bad job, people notice. If it were just about marketing, they wouldn't have any bad feedback, just as Procter & Gamble never gets any bad reviews of their toothpaste. Similarly, if they were only a marketing company, they wouldn't have made a Windows 7 House Party ad that is so easy to parody. (Warning, rated PG-13.) In fact, to slur Microsoft in this way is to misunderstand them. To pick one random fact, when I joined Microsoft in 1993, they had the same number of developers working on Word as Sun has working on all of OpenOffice today — 20.


Software is hard, and Microsoft has many thousands of smart and experienced developers. Its problem is this: Microsoft is greatly hampered by backward compatibility and old code. Having seen lots of codebases inside and outside Microsoft, I conclude that one of the best things the Macintosh and Linux have going for them is that Microsoft has so much baggage that it could be an airline.

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