After the Software Wars

Given the technology that's already available, we should have cars that drive us around, in absolute safety, while we lounge in the back and sip champagne. All we need is a video camera on the roof, plugged into a PC, right? We have all the necessary hardware, and have had it for years, but don't yet have robot-driven cars because we don't have the software. This book explains how we can build better software and all get our own high-tech chauffeur. None Free Software Army iBio None None None Distributed Development Linux Kernel Superiority The Feature Race Linux is Inexorably Winning Charging for an OS Free Software Only Costs PCs A Free Operating System Linux Distributions None Deep Blue has been Deep-Sixed DARPA Grand Challenge Software and the Singularity Google Conclusion None Software as a Science Definition of Free Software Copyleft and Capitalism Is Copyleft a Requirement for Free Software? Why write free software? Should all Ideas be Free? Pride of Ownership Where Does Vision Fit In? Governments and Free Software Should all Software be GPL? Microsoft's Responses to Free Software Just a Stab None Software is math Software is big Software is a fast-moving industry Copyright provides sufficient protection Conclusion Biotechnology Patents Openness in Health Care The Scope of Copyright Length of Copyright Fair Use Digital Rights Management (DRM) Music versus Drivers None Brief History of Programming Lisp and Garbage Collection Reliability Portability Efficiency Maintainability Functionality and Usability Conclusion None Sun locked up the code Sun obsessed over specs Sun locked up the design Sun fragmented Java Sun sued Microsoft Java as GPL from Day 0 Pouring Java down the drain Mono and Python Let's Start Today None IBM Red Hat Novell Debian Ubuntu Should Ubuntu Have Been Created? One Linux Distro? Apple Windows Vista None More Free Software Cash Donations Devices Reverse Engineering PC Hardware Fix the F'ing Hardware Bugs! Metrics Volunteers Leading Volunteers Must PC vendors ship Linux? The Desktop Approachability Monoculture Linux Dev Tools Backward Compatibility None Digital Images Digital Audio The Next-Gen DVD Mess MS's Support of Standards OpenDocument Format (ODF) Web None Phase II of Bill Gates' Career Space, or How Man Got His Groove Back The Space Elevator 21st Century Renaissance Warning Signs From the Future None US v. Microsoft Microsoft as a GPL Software Company The Outside World None None Acknowledgments 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. One might say that the richest alchemist who ever lived is my former boss, Bill Gates. (Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are close behind.) Human knowledge increasingly exists in digital form, so building new and better models requires the software to be improved. People can only share ideas when they also share the software to display and modify them. It is the expanded use of free software that will allow a greater ability for people to work together and increase the pace of progress. This book will demonstrate that a system where anyone can edit, share, and review the body of work will lead not just to something that works, but eventually to the best that the world can achieve! With better cooperation among our scientists, robot-driven cars is just one of the many inventions that will arrive -- pervasive robotics, artificial intelligence, and much faster progress in biology, all of which rely heavily on software. - Publisher I dropped out of the University of Michigan at age 20 to become a programmer at Microsoft, and worked there for 11 years writing code in many different groups. After leaving, I tried out Linux, saw the potential, and studied the problems. This is what I discovered... Given currently available technology, we should already have cars that drive us around in absolute safety, leaving us to lounge comfortably in the back while sipping champagne. We have all the hardware – the video cameras, motion sensors and high powered computers – and we’ve had this technology for decades. So why don’t cars drive themselves? The answer is that we don’t have the software. The software that will accomplish this vision will not be built by corporations like Microsoft and Apple, who are actually impeding technological progress – it will be built by the global community. Free software is a bit like Wikipedia, which over 2.5 years grew from nothing into the world’s largest encyclopedia. Free software is better for the free market, as free speech is better for the free market.