[pjmlp]

My dear, that was exactly what used to be when I started programming.

Plenty of successful companies used to live from selling all the stack.

In fact GCC only picked up steam the day Sun decided to start charging for the Solaris C compiler.

Thankfully the GPL hate crowd, by pushing MIT/BSD licenses has just brought us the future that will be the reinvention of the public domain and shareware of the 80's.

[dvdkon]

Computer systems have gotten much more complicated. The closest you can get to the "full stack" ideal is probably Microsoft, and even they've given up on maintaining a web browser. Full-stack worked for a while, but nowadays you'd need to be a goliath. You can't even pay for all the components you use, since many parts of today's critical infrastructure are community projects with no corporate backing.

[pjmlp]

Those of us on Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, IBM, Unisys, SAP, Oracle,... platforms mostly do pay for the whole stack, even if it means paying to various vendors.