Oh sure, the developers sometimes move on to bigger and better things. When it comes to the created works, however, the trajectory is depressingly consistent: Functional simplicity gives way to feature bloat, followed by brittleness, unreliability and, barring certain monopoly-friendly market conditions, oblivion.

For the bulk of its six-year existence, the Mozilla project has been the unwitting victim and symbol of this truism. Like Jacob Marley's ghost in "A Christmas Carol," the open-source browser seemed doomed to bear the sinful weight of its earlier, proprietary incarnation -- Netscape Communicator -- for eternity.

A funny thing happened on the way to oblivion, however. With no employer to guide them and no market to punish them, Mozilla developers stubbornly kept plugging. After delivering a stable 1.0 release of its Mozilla suite of applications (including a browser and a mail client) in 2002, four years after the project's launch and about two years beyond initial estimates, they proposed an even more ambitious, ground-up overhaul of the underlying source code. Given the steady half-decade flameout of the original Netscape user population, developers went with the obvious code name: Phoenix.

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In most cases you'd call it a recipe for disaster. In the case of Wal-Mart, a company with the power to force others to follow its technology agenda, you'd simply call it "tough love."

That two-word description, according to a January article in Computerworld Magazine, is exactly how Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott summed up his company's philosophy on radio frequency identification (RFID) in a speech to suppliers last winter. For those who missed it, the company sent out letters to top suppliers last June requesting that all pallets and boxes come equipped with RFID tags by Jan. 1, 2005, a request designed to facilitate better warehouse tracking. Suppliers so far seem to have gotten the message. This June, a year after the initial letter campaign requesting 100 participants, Wal-Mart reported that 137 companies had climbed aboard.

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It's a job with strange and unexpected twists. Take the time three years back when he and fellow University of Sussex researcher Jon Bird attempted to build an oscillator circuit using genetic algorithms and a handful of transistors. While a few circuits came out fitting the functional profile -- steady output, steady frequency -- one circuit took a strange path to get there. Instead of building internal feedback loops to reach the desired frequency, it had simply wired itself in a way that the radiated hum of a nearby computer went straight through the circuit and into the attached oscilloscope.

In other words, it cheated. The circuit had hacked the system by becoming a radio.

"The best way I can think to describe it is a mixture of respect and humor," says Layzell, summing up his reaction. "A bit like when a child solves a common problem in an original way: It always makes you smile."

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The simplified reason: Bridge designers, unused to iron as a structural material and railroad trains as a service load, had yet to grasp the full impact of a minor miscalculation anywhere within their plans. It wasn't until designers started introducing a conservative fudge factor, now known as the margin of error, that bridge designs developed enough redundancy and robustness to account for the occasional errant crossbeam or overloaded rail car.

"Basically civil engineers made bridges safe by recognizing that humans would be involved in every step of the bridge-building process," says David Patterson, a Berkeley computer science professor who has cited Petroski's statistic in numerous papers. "With human involvement comes the risk of human failure."

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It was about that time, Kestenbaum says, that a series of "fluke" addresses started popping up in the HTTP referrer log of his personal Web site, the historical cemetery database Political Graveyard.

"If you're at all concerned with how your Web site is being received, you're almost compulsively checking the logs to see who's coming in and from where," says Kestenbaum, laying the scene. "You get to know what sites are linking to you. Anything new gets your attention."

Even more attention-grabbing, Kestenbaum adds, was the fact that the fluke referrals came in bunches. Curious, Kestenbaum pasted in the URL and went to look. His disappointment was immediate. Expecting something interesting, he instead found a page filled with nothing but banner and pop up ads.

For a moment, Kestenbaum says, he suspected a glitch. How else could one explain a dozen or so Internet browsers flipping directly from a site boasting zero unpaid content to one documenting historical graveyards? It didn't make sense.

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A 24-year-old software engineer from Worcester, England, Harper knows what it's like to be new. It was only two years ago, after all, that Harper, an immigrant fresh in from the Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" online encyclopedia project, H2G2, encountered the scary freedom of wiki publishing -- where pretty much anyone can add his or her own thoughts to a Web site, even if that means overwriting or "correcting" what someone has already written.

"I think, like most people, I came across the idea and thought, 'This is madness,'" says Harper, looking back. "On [H2G2] you could have maybe five people editing an article. On Wikipedia you could have 50 people editing at once with no one person in control."

Today, Harper is one of a select few working to impose a civilized order on what has become one of the Internet's fastest growing boomtowns. Launched in January 2001 with barely a dozen articles, Wikipedia crossed the 500,000 articles mark in February, with posters contributing content in more than 30 languages and, by last measure, at a rate of 300,000 articles per year.

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Twelve months ago, Smith, who prefers not to give out her real name lest the blowback put her in the swelling ranks of unemployed U.S. engineers, began work on a high-stakes development project. Her orders were explicit: The company, a major Wall Street bank, needed the system, but with the stock market then in the midst of a three-year slide, it also needed to shave costs. Because her department could employ five skilled Indian programmers for the $1,000 it spent each day on a single U.S. programmer, an Indian subcontractor was quickly hired for the back-end work.

Twelve months and 150,000 frequent-flier miles later, the dark circles under Smith's eyes attest to how well the project is doing. What first looked like a novel shortcut has instead evolved into a death march. Every third week, she and her best Indian coders shuttle back and forth between Bangalore and Manhattan, patching up brittle code and patching over brittle emotions.

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In an attempt to mimic how the human brain processes sensory signals, Atick and his research team developed a computational model that zeroes in on a person's facial landmarks and measures the relative distances between them. Once stored, these measurements become, in essence, a template unique enough to match individuals with their photo-ID or mugshot images in various, controlled situations.

For Atick, a mathematical physicist by training, the future boiled down to two choices: He could debate the implications of that breakthrough amid the safe, quasi-utopian world of academia, or he could try to put it to work in the messy, dynamic world of commercial software.

"It was almost like a curse," says Atick, now the chief executive officer of Identix, a Minnesota-based leader in fingerprint- and facial-recognition technology. "You're cursed with the blessing of knowing something important, something that society wants. You feel like it belongs to society and not to you."

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"There really is no middle ground," wrote McBride. "The future of the global economy hangs in the balance."

The SCO Group is the Linden, Utah, outfit whose yearlong lawsuit against IBM has riveted the attention of the software universe. The company has inflamed the passions of thousands of open-source software developers by committing to a strategy of tarring Linux, which IBM supports commercially and which SCO representatives claim was a depository for misappropriated Unix source code licensed by SCO to IBM.

Labeling the political philosophy and legal strategies of the free-software movement "ill-founded" and "contrary to [the U.S.] system of copyright and patent laws," McBride has been unafraid to frame his company's legal battle as an all-or-nothing crusade. His bold statements are a major reason that the SCO-vs.-IBM battle has dominated open-source news coverage throughout 2003. Looking back at the "year in open source," it might even seem that SCO was the only story anyone was paying attention to.

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The only problem, of course, is that they don't know it. All the images are recorded in an obsolete digital format, JPEG, and nobody knows how to unscramble the data. As a result, the hard disk containing said artwork spends its days not in a museum but as a coffee coaster in some college professor's crowded office.

"It might seem silly now, but put yourself 1,000 years in the future," says Booch, chief scientist at IBM's Rational Software subsidiary. "It's not too hard to imagine."

In an industry where one man's clever C code is another man's Linear B, Booch already knows the frustration of playing software archaeologist. As co-developer of the Universal Modeling Language (UML), a mid-1990s effort to create a common "blueprint" notation for object-oriented software programs, he's spent the last 10 years laboring to spare future programmers the same torment.

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OK, now imagine the looks of terror on the faces of existing machine makers. Imagine if the only thing stopping your handheld PDA from simultaneously being a GPS receiver, phone, radio or miniature TV was your willingness to download and install some free software program.

For Eric Blossom, founder of the GNU Radio project, the vision plays itself over and over again, like a Möbius film strip. An electrical engineer by trade, Blossom knows better than most the thin barriers that separate one person's garage-door opener from another person's global positioning satellite receiver. He also knows the proprietary barriers that hinder technological innovation. Rather than curse those walls, Blossom has decided to gut the floor plan entirely with the help of free software. Sony, Philips and Nokia be damned.

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Earlier this summer, Microsoft and China, two inscrutable monoliths waging a protracted cold war over copyrights and software pricing, finally decided to settle their differences via a three-year, $750 million "memorandum of understanding," the largest deal ever between the Chinese government and a foreign software company.

Details of the "understanding," announced in June, were both vague and open-ended. About the only overlap between both parties' descriptions was that Microsoft was supplying the $750 million and China was supplying the human resources. Still, given the background of the relationship, it seemed a safe bet that China's 92 percent software piracy rate -- second worst in the world, according to the Business Software Alliance -- had been a central issue during the negotiations.

Or maybe not. Asked about the glaring lack of a copyright enforcement clause in the new deal, Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer did a quick Nixonian shuffle.

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"To be perfectly blunt about it, I had no idea what an IPO was or what stock options meant," admits Jennings.

Three years and $1.4 billion in evaporated investors' money later, Jennings can no longer feign ignorance. Like a farmer who has seen a tornado from the inside, Jennings recalls the company's historic first day of public trading with a mixture of bemusement and awe.

"None of us expected it to be nearly as big as it was," he says, drifting back to Dec. 9, 1999, the day NASDAQ investors turned Jennings and many of his co-workers into momentary paper millionaires. "I don't think even the president of the company knew it was going to be such a massive deal."

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As Eli Collins, a programmer with the New York-based software firm Union Square Internet Development, scoured the list of error messages, Tom Clarke, Collins' colleague and "pair programming" partner for the afternoon, made the discovery.

"I think I see it," said Clarke.

"Where?" asked Collins.

"Right here," Clarke said, pointing toward a line of source code on the screen. "Looks like you left out the second 'i' in 'original' on line 172."

Within seconds, Collins, the designated typist, had fixed the error. With a click of the return button, the program was running once again through a battery of internal tests written by the two-man coding team over the last two weeks. This time around, the offending red tinge signifying a failed test was gone. The program's status bar showed solid green. Zero failures. Their newest feature, a point-and-click editing command, had received the green light, literally, and Collins and Clarke were ready to move on.

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"You'll have to forgive me," apologizes Lehman at one point, sifting through a pile of research papers on a nearby shelf. "Since I lost my secretary, I can't seem to find anything."

The pile, a collection of recently published papers investigating the topic of software evolution, a topic Lehman helped inaugurate back in the 1970s, is something of a taunting tribute. Written by professional colleagues at other universities, each paper cites Lehman's original 1969 IBM report documenting the evolutionary characteristics of the mainframe operating system, OS/360, or his later 1985 book "Program Evolution: Processes of Software Change," which expands the study to other programs. While the pile's growing size offers proof that Lehman and his ideas are finally catching on, it also documents the growing number of researchers with whom Lehman, a man with dwindling office space and even less in the way of support, must now compete.

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