I'm the source of the original story. (Thanks, Clif, for choosing my post!) What I submitted was much longer and what I was really interested in unintended resuse of Open Source code and the emergence of tools to support such practices. You can see the unabridged version on my lab's web site.

I'd like to respond to a few of the comments.

I'm not trying to float an idea, I'm just making some observations of what people are currently doing.

Yes, reuse is old. Reuse is sometimes bad and sometimes good.

But what is new, I think, is the wholesale use Open Source systems as components, and the way in which people trawl the web for source code. We've had libraries, DLLs, Perl modules, classes, and the like for ages, but these were designed to be reused. But these Open Source systems were built as stand-alone systems, that people are turning into components ad hoc. When people start designing a system, they start with the idea, see what's available out there that they can reuse, and continue the design process from there. I was trying to ask some speculative questions about what software tools are needed in these situations.

In particular, there has been a proliferation of search engines for code on the web, such as koders.com, krugle.com, Google Code Search, and Sourcerer, here at UCI. (I'm just a university researcher and not affiliated with these sites in any way.) I have a suspicion that people need features other than the ones built into these tools and that people are being very creative with existing web resources to locate the code that they want. I am a conducting a web survey to find out whether this is the case.

I had been told that Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky," contains more detail about zones of thought and complexity, and it's sitting on my shelf. But I didn't want to insert a gratuitous reference to a source that I have not read. Look elsewhere on this topic for a more detailed discussion of Vinge's ideas.

The comments have been really interesting. Some went in directions that I didn't anticipate and others provided insights that were new to me.