[kilobit]

Exactly. Suppose a piece of software remains around for another year with probability p, and for the sake of this example, that p is constant.

Then if the software has been around for one year, the expected value of p is 50%. But if the software has been around for ten years, the expected value of p jumps to 0.5^(1/10) ≈ 93.3%.

In this way, if a piece of software has been around for longer, then it has a greater chance of sticking around. In fact, the expected number of years it has left is indeed equal to the number of years it has already been around, as stated in the article.

In practice this mechanism is more complicated, as all software is influenced by a changing environment, but this same idea is still at the core.

[kuboble]

> Then if the software has been around for one year, the expected value of p is 50%. But if the software has been around for ten years, the expected value of p jumps to 0.5^(1/10) ≈ 93.3%.

This reasoning is incorrect. You have to take the distribution of p into account.

In a world where almost every software has p=0.5 the software which has been around for 10 years is likely to have been lucky and not to have higher p.