Building open source code is like building a perfectly preserved structure that exists forever in time without degredation or decay.
Our DNA/RNA is kind of the same. Once the initial hard work of constructing the code is done, and as long as the information is copied and persists through time, we can construct new versions of ourselves over and over.
Software is "alive" in a similar sense. The main downside is that it is not self-replicating or self-constructing.
Software lines can die out once the system evolves and the APIs become incompatible, so open source code must be contually evolve so that it works in the surrounding systems (OS, hardware), but that is probably the same with any subsystem within ourselves as well.
I like imagining my software as some alien obelisk that stands alone in the universe, waiting to be discovered millions of years in the future by some curious ancient-earth archaeologist.
Maybe code that renders json blobs to reverse-chronological feeds will be as quaint to future intelligences as hunter-gatherer cave paintings. More likely I have just been reading too many hard scifi space operas.
// end of random train of thought, captains log, stardate -298314
