The world is getting larger again.

Back when the book "Around the World in 80 Days" was set, transportation was improving and distances were getting easier to traverse. As the book tells it, this trend led to someone claiming that it was possible to travel around the world in a mere 80 days, which so astonished someone else that they expressed their disbelief by asking facetiously whether the original claimant thought the world was shrinking.

Of course the Earth itself had not been shrinking, but the time required to get from place to place had. And since then, the trend continued through improved roads, railways, ships and aircraft global travel has caused the world to become tiny. Why even as recently as my grandmother's day the word "imported" stamped on a product raised it's status and value instead of reduced it. To go to the expense of bringing something in from overseas was a costly novelty. Now it's trivial. I know there are other factors at work in this change, but my point is that distance used to be an impediment, and now it is far less of one.

The world has been shrinking for centuries, but now it is about to snap back. It might not be as large as it used to be before the continents were mapped. The virtual world will still exist just outside this window that is my computer monitor. But for real life transport of people and things across the face of the planet - it's getting further each day. Every increase in the price of oil, every millimetre lower the world oil reserves dipstick reads, the planet expands.

I fear that this expansion of the world will not be as slow or as gentle as it's shrinking was. The ethereal trails we humans make as we go about our daily lives may be broken as the world undergoes a hulk-like transformation, shaking off the fetters that we've used to keep it small. Roads are vulnerable to disuse and decay. Railways are long under-funded and may not take the sudden jump in usage. Aircraft with their ravenous appetites may once again become a rare things that children point at and shout "Look! A 'plane!"

There may be an upside to the world getting bigger. A return of locality and of community. Less footprints in distant, isolated places. Perhaps outsourced jobs will come home to roost? It's hard to say. Hard to see what's next. But the world seems far bigger to me today than it did yesterday.

End of hiatus

I've not blogged here for many months now. There was a good reason, but now I'm recommencing using this blog as was originally intended; collecting some of my more coherent posts from other places in one relatively uncluttered blog.

Open Source vs Proprietary Software ethos

In the "Open Source and Linux" unit yesterday, the lecturer (lovely guy. Kind and competent) was describing an aspect of the difference between the business models and ethos of proprietary software as opposed to open Source. I've long understood the basic differences, but the reasoning behind the difference ...sort of distilled out for me a little more.

I found myself thinking of that saying "If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a life time."

The key point at which this attaches to proprietary software makers is; they don't *give* fish away. They *sell* them. They have a vested interest in making sure that nobody (who is not employed by them) knows how to catch fish.

By contrast, open source software developers and advanced users have a vested interest in encouraging and helping people to learn to catch their own fish. In fact, the motivation is at least twofold: if the new users learn to catch their own fish, they won't keep relying on the OS guru for fish. What is more, when the guru finds themselves in need of fish, the people they have mentored or meta-mentored are likely to deluge them with all the fish they need.

I am not sure whether this is a novel analogy. Probably not, as it seems so clear and simple.