The islands in the Oceania metaphor are individual open source software projects, and the ocean is of course the Internet. It’s significant that the ocean is gray, for reasons that will be discussed later.
Scanning with your binoculars is performing a search for the phrase “open source” with your favorite Internet search engine. The large, recognizable islands are the projects that show up near the top of the search results, likely including Linux, Apache, and Firefox.
Looking through your telescope is taking a careful look at an individual search result in the list. Going ashore is following a search result link to open the home page of a project website. The satellite photograph is the visual results map you get when you search for “open source” with the Grokker search engine, like this one:
Grokker Visual Search Results Map for “Open Source”
The treasure chests hold free downloadable applications, which are jewels for two reasons – they can do something useful for you, and they also provide a quick way of understanding what a particular project is about. The treasure chests are on the shores of the islands because links to downloadable applications are usually displayed prominently on the home pages of the projects. Islands without treasure chests are projects which haven’t reached the stage of releasing a working application. Empty treasure chests hold applications that, for various reasons, don’t run on your computer. Perhaps they’re buggy beta test versions, are just too old to be compatible, or maybe they’re for a different hardware platform.
The rugged terrain of an island is the source code for its application, which enables you to modify and customize the application for your own uses. However, this body of source code is typically large and complex, and therefore takes considerable time to understand and evaluate, hence the image of difficult terrain to explore. The terrain of the islands also includes swamps, for reasons that will be discussed later.
Islands covered with dust and cobwebs are abandoned projects whose websites are still running on autopilot. Islands covered with impenetrable jungles are those with source code written in a programming language you’re not fluent in; you can’t read the code.
