The role of accidents in the theory of science is not disputed, If you employ evolutionary models, accidents assume a most important role. Without them, nothing happens, no progress is made. Without variation in the given material of ideas, there are no possibilities of examining and selecting novelties. The real problem thus becomes therefore one of producing accidents with sufficiently enhanced probabilities for selection. As we know from the analysis of processes of mutation in biological evolution, mutations are complex and highly regulated events, which only because they are preselected at their own level exhibit that kind of stability that is the presupposition for selective permanence. They are accidents in the sense that they are not tuned to the factors that select them, but they depend themselves on complex orders.

Last year, O’Reilly Media went so far as to coin the term InnerSource to characterize this phenomenon:Inspired by the spread of open source software throughout the areas of operating systems, cloud computing, JavaScript frameworks, and elsewhere, a number of companies are mimicking the practices of the powerful open source movement to create an internal company collaboration under the rubric InnerSource.