The best software is No Software. Hammers and screwdrivers are reliable, understandable, and secure because they use No Software.
No Software is provably invulnerable to all security attacks. No Software is infinitely scaleable, because No Software runs in zero clock cycles on all CPU architectures. No Software can be certified error-free without effort. No Software is free from linguistic and cultural bias.
No Software can be developed equally well under any programming paradigm, in any language, by programmers of any skill level, without impact on any budget or schedule that managers can devise.
Software vendors and software users have intrinsically different interests in this matter. Although the vendors do their best to confuse the issue by keeping their customers occupied with upgrades, licenses, training and certifications, remember this: software companies can't survive if they sell No Software. For users, on the other hand, having the option of buying No Software can lead to substantial savings.
Free software writers are people who like to write software. Sometimes they overlook the advantages of writing No Software. Having given us the usual belt/suspenders choice, they also offer safety pins and bungee cords, and are working on anti-gravity devices for the next release. GNU Emacs and Perl are this way for philosophical reasons, but the True Way, as taught by the original creators of Unix, is to write No Software when it's possible to do a job by cleverly combining the existing parts of a relatively simple system.
This is not Zen. It has nothing to do with the views of the Amish or the Taliban. A world without software would be as inhospitable as the world of PeopleSoft and Enterprise Java Beans. We just need to ask the right kind of questions:
