Geek post again, so skip stuff that makes no sense :)
To Integrate or not to integrate?
For
Apple,
MS and Oracle they only integrate hardware and software when they are desparate to enter a
new market.
Once they take over that market they make it as un-interoperable as they
can. Other companies, like IBM, get rich by integrating stuff. FaceBook does
not want to integrate, but everything wants to integrate with it. OpenOffice/Libre Office is more the reverse, but wants, and does, both. Hurrah for Open Standards, like ODF.
Nature
has been playing these games for billennia. In the primordial soup, cells shared
DNA directly -horizontally - DNA floated in the oceans and Cells
grabbed what they needed, and dumped DNA back.
Suddenly
life went to non-interoperable mode - for example, multi-cellular life does not
directly (horizontally) share genes, only vertically, via sex, with horizontal
gene transfer happening slowly through biological viruses.
Open
source is about horizontal gene (code) transfer, closed source is more about vertical gene (code) transfer. The analogy cannot go too far, though, as with code we have sentient designers, where as with life we have unconscious evolution (which can also happen with software via Genetic Algorithms). In parallel,
much open and closed source code is evolving darwinistically also, due to market and popularity selection forces.
The greatest level of integration ever achieved was at the start of life, when all cells integrated via the floating genes to make them into a super-organism. It were as if all software could swap chunks of its own code via the Internet.
