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Rallying the faithful at ApacheCon Europe last night, Douglas Adams -- legendary author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- told an audience of 300 that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, and that those in Apache community were on the cutting edge of creativity and empowerment.

"When I was growing up, the question was: who's going to be in charge?" Adams said. "But we all know that's not the case -- we're in charge."

Adams praised the Apache audience for providing the tools for true democratization, loosening powers from large institutions -- like governments and multinational corporations -- and placing power back in the hands of the people. This allows good ideas to rise from the bottom, rather than be imposed on the masses from the top.

Some of Adams' statements were slightly confusing, however. While praising Amazon as essentially a community site (even though a raft of editors prepare the vast majority of the editorial content on the site), he criticized the British Airways site for not providing flight information about its competitors.

"I would imagine that many customers will do some comparison-shopping and then book through another site, so British Airways loses the chance for a direct sale," he said, ignoring the fact that airlines are quite used to bookings from outside sources (like travel agents and travel sites like Expedia), and that the site he praised as being community-oriented -- Amazon -- didn't provide information on what its competitors (Barnes & Noble, Borders) are doing, either. But he admitted to being a little befuddled by Amazon, anyway:

"The odd thing about their business model is that when you start to buy books, they lose money."

He also took the e-commerce and Internet industries to task for not providing a viable method of micropayments, arguing that Napster and other file-sharing technologies would not be necessary if someone could just buy a copy of a song or book for a small amount of money.

"Ninety percent of the price of a book or record goes to overhead," he said. "With micropayments, money could go directly to the author."

Adams's speech culminated a busy day of action at London's Olympia exhibition center, where attendees could choose from a wide range of technical seminars and BOF sessions presented by experts in the Apache community. (Apache Today was a media sponsor of ApacheCon.) The next ApacheCon will be held next spring in Santa Clara, California.

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