I have been listening to The World is Flat in my car as I drive from Brookline to Newton to Burlington to Brookline to Cambridge etc. It is ironic to listen to a book about how easy it is to virtualize work so that I can eek out some learning while I am not virtually doing work (sort-of) in cities that are each twenty to thirty miles apart.

I think that the book is interesting although my main beefs about it are that I already know a lot of what is in the first section of the book going over the history of the past ten years because I lived in it and had my eyes open. But I am willing to suffer through a long explanation of what PayPal is in order to get some inside views and interviews with folks that I never had the time or availability of information to get while the Internet bubble/boom was starting.

I also missed out because I was busy on a lot of areas that evolved and I didn't even notice because I wasn't looking. While we used Open Source software at ChannelWave I never understood much about the history and how short the history was and how it was linked to the Internet itself with the first real big hit open source project being the Apache web server. The name Apache was both because the group wanted to appear to be a defiant and independant organization that was strong. Apparently the Apache Native Americans were the last tribe to surrender to the Europeans. But the word also can be heard as A-Patchy Server. The Open Source concept was to apply patches from multiple sources once vetted to keep improving and maintaining the software.

When interviewed, one of the original Apache leaders stressed that software is more like a vegetable than a building - it gets stale if it isn't constantly refreshed. I like to think of it as more like a living organism or group of reproducing living organisms such that both the code (kinda like the original genetic stuff) will die if it isn't both maintained locally where it lives in the computer ecosystem it is run or become unable to compete overall with other code trying to fill the same niche through the source code improvement process.

Apache and Open Source made the evolution of software able to operate more like the evolution of living organisms and gave a difference between the good old monoploid - the host continues it's own line to a diploid/sexual recombinant model. So even if it is free it is also free to expand and change rapidly. It will be interesting to see the long term war of the worlds between the open source software and tools and the Microsoft tools. At some point there might be a tipping point, which is what the Open Source folks are hoping for, where the balance of power shifts away from Microsoft. But for now it is safe to expect that if you want to sell desktop software then sending checks to Redmond is the best way to pull it off.