The Borg architecture as a metaphor for FLOSS

The Borg (yes, the ones from the Star Trek series) are an alien species with a unique peculiarity: every “individual” is connected to any other through a high speed communication network, thus any knowledge acquired by any member of the community is instantly spread/shared and taken advantage of. This mechanism makes The Borg very knowledgeable and adaptive, they are virtually invincible in battle and wherever they go they assimilate other cultures. This article argues that The Borg architecture and capability is a close metaphor of FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) paradigm... with some differences of course, luckily. FLOSS has some limitations but also some advantages over the fictional Star Trek alien civilization. First of all, FLOSS is not Evil. Authors will use, as an example, a system (codenamed NetLAMPS) they recently built (based entirely on FLOSS) to gather road/traffic status information. This software is enough complex (involves many technologies: mail, cell phones, gps, webcams, network, etc.) to represent a reasonable example and at the same time enough manageable (less than 3k LOC - Lines of Code) to be almost entirely explained in this article.