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In Why most things fail, Paul Ormerod gleefully attacks economic orthodoxy. Traditional economic theory fails to explain the complexity and dynamics of the real world. Much more promising is an artificial life approach. Here, unpredictable interactions between simple agents give rise to complex behavior of the system as a whole.

Creating a simple computer model of a software market in which some firms pursue an open source strategy turns out to be very instructive, and funny.

See the group of ooo.......> agents up top? That's the open sourcers, competing with the closed source xxxxx.........> firms. You can click on the image to see an animation, or download the model and run your own simulations.