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Philosophically, the open source concept borrows some selected elements from socialism. It upholds a notion of the "common good," it eschews the appearance of authority or hierarchy, and it often frowns upon capitalizing on one's own work, insofar as being exclusive. In practice, however, open source projects may look less like Big Brother from 1984 and more like Big Brother from reality TV.

Joshua McKenty's still-young career is, compared to those of other capitalist executives, surprisingly replete. He's led development teams for the Netscape browser, and is intimately familiar with Netscape's successors at Mozilla. His next stroke of luck was with the space program, helping to create and then lead one of the world's most successful cloud computing projects, NASA Nebula. His work with NASA spawned the open source community's most successful - and perhaps most important - project in the last few years, the OpenStack cloud operating system - and he sits on that project's governing body. In-between jobs, he just happened to pioneer an earthquake modeling system for the World Bank.

Looking to have some fun this weekend and want to spend a few minutes taking a trip down memory lane? How about taking Network World's browsing test here. (link corrected) No, we aren't talking about verifying your HTML code, just your general knowledge of browser-based trivia. There are questions on the origins of Netscape (remember them?), what was the first Apple browser that pre-dated Safari, and questions about who really invented the browser. Some of the questions are very easy and some will take some study, or at least the ability to bring up Google and ask the right question. At least we don't write about the "browser wars" anymore.

And here is a short historical treatment in a great infographic by Jacob Gube .

AOL has been in the news this week with changing the face of tech journalism once again, as we wrote about here. So I started going down memory lane and the list of their acquisitions over the past couple of decades. It is an interesting selection of mostly misplaced investments. But what struck me was how AOL was in the right place, but not necessarily at the right time or for the right price. And many of these buys enabled Internet gazillionaires to flourish and found their own tech ventures later on that were key players in our industry.

We've already revealed our picks for the "Best Web BigCo" and "Best Web LittleCo" of the past 12 months. But not everything was so rosy for some companies on the web this year. Below we've gathered our list of the top flubs in the web technology sector in 2007. In fact, one of the companies we named as our year's best is on the list. Feel free to add your picks in the comments.