How is software growth like a plant? What are the nutrients (revenue/volunteers)? The positive feedback loop (commits). The negative feedback loop (deprecations

How is software growth like a plant? What are the nutrients (revenue/volunteers)? The positive feedback loop (commits). The negative feedback loop (deprecations)? Prusinkiewicz & Lindenmayer modeled the growth of plants[1]. Each has a shape, which evolved to exploit a certain terrain. Mathematica exploits one terrain. Sun Microsystems exploited another terrain with Java. I wonder if it possible to map these terrains across all the Github projects? [1] http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop.pdf http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop.pdf