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Something I wonder is whether productized software needs to exist as an industry in its own right. Maybe it is enough for software to be incidentally produced in the course of other industries. The Linux kernel is today developed mostly by those with a commercial interest in using and supporting it, such as Intel, Google, Samsung and IBM. LLVM is supported largely by Apple; Go by Google; React by Facebook.

Comparatively, science and mathematics, which software is arguably conceptually closer to, haven't ended as human endeavours for want of direct commercial exploitation.