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After 11 years working in the world’s largest software company, Microsoft, Keith Curtis has written a book, After the Software Wars. Surprisingly enough it isn’t about how life was at Microsoft but much against his former employer’s anticipation he sides with the Open Source to be the software’s future. Microsoft has always had a tough time accepting Open Source, while many others in the business (Sun Microsystems. etc) have readily accepted it and are bent at perfecting and bringing more softwares to add to its growing list (Google for one).

It’s so obvious that with people looking for the cheapest alternative (and those that are worth it) and the Cloud becoming a norm slowly and gradually, paid software will eventually be the story of the past as developers put their heads together to bring the best. A passage from his book reads:

The difference between free, and non-free or proprietary 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 mechanisms used to convert lead into gold.

Every one of those developers out there is an alchemist and there is no one to guard their collaborative expertise to Open Source every software.