[James_K]

> Two years isn’t a lifetime.

It is in software development. You don't even deny that the project stays source available while developers care about it.

> If there is value left

So, once you've extracted as much value as you want from something, the community is free to have whatever's left? I think "you can have the scraps" is an excellent summation of that philosophy.

[pas]

in many fields it's really not that long. it might be a hundred years in JavaScript framework land, but it's nothing in enterprise/government/medical/industrial/built-infrastructure.

temporary monopolies are a trivial "solution" for the economic incentives problem, but of course it's not not really a great one. discontinuities usually cause their own issues, and even 2 years of vendor-lock-in can do nasty things to an OpEx budget.