PrintMay 7, 2010
Free Software and Tech Progress
Moore's law has been humming along for four decades now, doubling our CPU power every eighteen months. Cellphone-sized devices today have more capacity than a stadium of computers from twenty years ago. Networked digital computers are giving us new forms of collaboration on a massive scale, causing our society to enter the digital renaissance. We now have the tools to solve some very tough problems; one might argue that we never could cure cancer without creating computers and the internet first.While the shiny hardware always gets all the attention, software is the workhorse and the magic behind it all. Richard Feynman said, "The inside of a computer is dumb as hell but it goes like mad." A computer is just as happy to add 0 + 0 billions of times per second all day long. It is software that tells the hardware precisely how to convert between bits and ideas.The key to faster technological progress is the more widespread use of free software. Free versus proprietary (or...(Read Full Article)
