In order to get insight in that future I look to examples close to API. One such area is proprietary standard documents that covers proprietary protocols. What

In order to get insight in that future I look to examples close to API. One such area is proprietary standard documents that covers proprietary protocols. What does it mean for a protocol to be proprietary? Usually that a single company control all the software that communicate with each other under that protocol. Software stacks became platform for that vendor, and Microsoft was infamous in using this technique in binding people to the Microsoft ecosystem in the previous two decades. However in recent time DRM has been used to create a similar effect and companies has started to abandon the idea of preventing others from creating protocol compatibility by hiding how the protocol works or by burying it in legal swamps. If you want a walled garden you just put in cryptographic verification tests at the client, server and hardware level. Using DRM for a programming language in order to create a walled garden is a bit harder. We can imagine a Java 2.0 (evil version) where the byte code has DRM that checks for unauthorized java compilers, but it won't work if the physical programmer can choose to move to a new platform. DRM can thus not create a wall garden for a programming language unless there is legal walls that prevent a competitor to create a compatible platform.