[OkayPhysicist]

Because software is more like the song on a record than a record player: I have songs that were bought on vinyl, transferred to cassette, then transferred again from vinyl to CD, then from CD onto my computer as digital files, then copied from device to device for the last 2 decades. The record player, in contrast, died years ago.

Software's even better! Since it was inherently digital to begin with, I'm able to make leaps like that with ZERO data loss! The only thing that kills software permanently is planned obsolesce. It doesn't matter what the lifetime of your saw is, that's like arguing that you should be free to shoot nonagenarians because most people don't live that long anyway. It's not about how long other stuff lasts, it's about the fact that it was perfectly capable of going on living until it was killed.