After the Software Wars (2009/05/27)

Keith Curtis recently wrote a book with the title After the Software Wars. I really enjoyed reading the book. As a former Microsoft employee he seems to be very aware of the differences between proprietary software and free software. Curtis explains the current constellation of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Blogspot, … which is well known to people working in the field. However I was positively surprised that Curtis is able to look beyond the current bubble of web startups.

Curtis actually sees the future of computer science in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and computer vision. While I doubt it, that there will be a “Torvalds of computer vision” (unless it’s Gary Bradski) I strongly agree with the notion that the future challenges of computer science in general and robotics in particular can’t be taken on by individual companies developing proprietary products. It will require us to share our knowledge with each other. Curtis also criticises universities for increasingly engaging in proprietary software development. Finally the book encourages developers to consider adopting modern programming languages.

Update: Keith Curtis started a discussion in the OpenCV mailing list. The various posts suggest that most OpenCV developers will not consider using Ruby (or Python) as long as the performance is not on par with code generated by GCC/G++.

See also:

• Homepage of Keith Curtis
• OpenRacing project Wiki

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