Apropos of nothing it occurs to me that one way to make it lucrative to build totally open and freely distributed software is to invent a caustic software envir

Apropos of nothing it occurs to me that one way to make it lucrative to build totally open and freely distributed software is to invent a caustic software environment. E.g. keep changing the hardware and software dependencies so that anything you did build and give away has to be built again. And again and again. That's one way to make a living from software in the long term, but it sure does seem wasteful. And if the technology truly hits an asymptote, then it's not clear what will drive the decay apart from programmer self-interest.