LIKE COUNTLESS OTHER urban, Web-savvy media consumers too lazy to leave their apartments, I greeted last month's demise of Kozmo.com with something alarmingly close to actual grief. Not because it suggested more dark clouds ahead for the already gloomy dot-com sector, nor because I had some kind of direct financial stake in the online delivery service itself. I found myself mourning for Kozmo because I had become an avid user of the service, and had begun to wrap a subsection of my daily impulse buying habits around its bright orange plastic bags. Just as Amazon had transformed my book-purchasing habits two years ago, Kozmo had become my default source for DVDs, games, and late-night snacks -- almost entirely eliminating the longstanding relationships I'd had with Blockbuster, assorted software stores, and the twenty-four-hour deli on my corner. Waking up one day to find that the site had vanished into thin air meant that -- for the first time -- the rhythms and rituals of my consumer life had been interrupted by the dot-com bubble bursting. The collapse of Pseudo, Pets.com, Boo -- not to mention the thousand failed companies I'd never heard of -- were really only passing headlines for me. But Kozmo had entered my life in some small but significant way, and when they shut their doors, it left a little hole in my daily routine that I've had a hard time filling.

I was reminded of that hole when I read the transcript of Craig Mundie's much remarked upon speech from early May, in which the Microsoft executive laid out the company's "shared source" software development model, and took a few passing swipes at the open source movement -- and particularly the GNU General Public License (or GPL) that governs many open source projects. The antagonism between Redmond and the open source community is heated enough that anytime Microsoft so much as mentions the word Linux or Apache in a public statement, it triggers a deluge of close readings, counterattacks, and thousand-post threads on Slashdot. But Mundie's comments were particularly interesting because they also attempted to put an interpretive frame around the dot-com implosion -- a frame that explicitly linked the shortsightedness of the bubble economy to the perceived liabilities of open source models. "In this sense," Mundie argued near the end of his talk, "open source software based on the GPL mirrors the dot-com business models that proved the least successful during the past year. They ask software developers to give away for free the very thing they create that is of greatest value in the hope that somehow they’ll make money selling something else. In effect, it puts at risk the continued vitality of the independent software sector."

Those are fighting words, and they outline a smart position for Microsoft to take -- but they're also based on a delicate chain of associations. The "least successful" dot-com companies were not necessarily involved directly in the open source software movement. (For all we know, the folks at DEN and Pseudo were serving their free content off of NT boxes.) What those dot-bombs shared with open source software was a willingness to give away for little or no cost products that a company like Microsoft might be inclined to charge for. Kozmo, for instance, was famous for charging so little for its goods that their revenues didn't even cover the salaries of the delivery guys. It's this tendency to give things away for free that grants Mundie his parallel between the two sectors, letting him write the posthumous history of one field as an indirect way of analyzing the prospects of another. His autopsy of the bodies in the dot-com graveyard sets the stage for a prediction about the future health of open source.

Not surprisingly, his prognosis isn't good.