Free software ameliorates this problem. The code is free to live on independent of its authors or parent organization. Sun may or may not have killed its busine

Free software ameliorates this problem. The code is free to live on independent of its authors or parent organization. Sun may or may not have killed its business by making all of its software open and free, but the community benefited from that immensely when Oracle took over. We don't have to start from scratch, just have to use free software. Your post also seems to assume that everyone will upgrade to the "next release". On platforms where you get to control your upgrade cycle, people won't upgrade if the upgrade breaks the programs they want to use, and this acts as a check on gratuitous API/ABI breakage. Microsoft takes this extremely seriously and has hardly any API breakage over the last 20 years because they know that there's a real threat that a competitor could emerge with WINE pre-bundled and take away some market share if they break a lot of programs.