Significant software development today is less often pursued by one group in one location, and more often by a team distributed across countries or continents. These new conditions bring added value to some traditional software advice, and raise new software engineering issues. I will try to draw some lessons from two experiences of highly distributed projects in which I am actively involved, one from industry and the other from a university setup: the EiffelStudio development at Eiffel Software, and the DOSE course (Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering) which for the past two years has involved a distributed course project common to courses in several universities.