I spent the first nice warm Saturday morning of the spring curled up on my back deck reading the first 90 and last 50 pages of Birmingham native Keith Curtis' new book, "After the Software Wars."
Curtis' ideas about software are heresy for a former Microsoft Corp. executive. He says the days of proprietary software are numbered and companies like Microsoft are likely doomed -- and that free open-source-code software will eventually run the world.
Curtis likens most of today's software development to medieval alchemy, where each alchemist jealously guarded his knowledge and shared it with no one.
Instead, Curtis said, software is science -- "you reason, you create a hypothesis in the form of source code, and then you test the hypothesis by running it on a computer." And he'd like the scientific community's methods applied to software -- you publish your results, in this case your source code. That way others can test it and try to replicate your results -- and they can also tinker with it and try to improve it and let it lead them in new directions.
He says we still live in the dark ages of computing because proprietary software is still the dominant model. And he tees off in a gutsy way on Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others.
In fact, Curtis blames most of that nagging feeling most of us have about the 21st Century -- where's my self-driving car? where's my robot maid? -- on proprietary software.
If all software was as open to the contributions and corrections of the entire wired human race as Linux, we'd probably already have all that stuff, he says.
"A free operating system is where Metcalfe's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law) meets software: the more people using free software, the more applications will be built for it," Curtis writes. "Just one piece of free software isn't useful, but with an entire stack, we can enter a shining age."
Curtis is also a fan of the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia and writes: "Wikipedia and the Linux kernel are two of the best examples that free software and the free exchange of ideas can create superior things without any licensing fees. The mere existence of these gigantic products, without a gigantic company behind them, is proof that proprietary software is doomed."
And then there's this: "There is reason for optimism about the scientific challenges we confront because the global community's ability to solve problem is greater than the universe's ability to create them. The truth waiting for us on the nature of matter, DNA, intelligence, etc. has been around for billions of years. There are millions of computer scientists sitting around wondering why we haven't yet solved the big problems in computer science. It should be no surprise that software is moving forward so slowly because there is so much duplication of effort and lack of cooperation."
In a section of predictions for the future near the end of the book, Curtis tees off on NASA in a most entertaining way for going back to the moon with 1960s technology and enthuisiastically backs space elevators. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator)
Curtis was a programmer at Microsoft for 11 years, working on Windows, Office, and in Microsoft research, when he left the company to write his book.
Skip the last 25 pages of the book unless you're a big fan of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, whom Curtis quotes enthusiastically and at length, along with other Bush-backing neocons. He lays current economic problems at the feet of the "Democrat party" and blames liberals mandating that poor people be allowed to buy houses for the implosion of the banking system (not mentioning the overleverage of bad loans in trillions of dollars of unregulated derivatives).
Curtis, born in Birmingham, attended the University of Michigan and studied computer science. He was recruited by Microsoft and moved to Seattle, Wash., where he lives.
After the Software Wars is available at Amazon.com and other online book retailers. The book has also been reviewed by the New York Times and is the topic of discussion on many blogs.
The Times review by John Markoff read in part: "Keith Curtis takes a programmer's approach in Software Wars, attempting to systematically build a case that software can help pave the way for a 21st-century renaissance in many fields ranging from artificial intelligence (cars that drive themselves) to the human journey into space (space elevators). For Keith, free software is all about leveraging our collective intelligence."
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