You seem to be looking at software as a dead artefact like a greek temple that was built hundreds of years ago and that still stands. But it is also an element

You seem to be looking at software as a dead artefact like a greek temple that was built hundreds of years ago and that still stands. But it is also an element of culture. In my mind, software only half-way exists on the disk. That's the artefact-part of it. It also half-way exists in creators' and users' heads. That's the culture-part of it. If you take any piece of culture, like music or dance or cooking, then you'll quickly start to see the parallels. Both the craft of making the music, doing the dancing/cooking etc and the discovery/appreciation of music, dancing, cooking etc has to be passed along from generation to generation and spread through social networks to keep it alive. The fact that bits don't rot is just not enough. It takes active engagement and cycles of invention and reinvention to keep it alive. I think this is quite a liberating thought. Conversely an "oldster" saying something like "I did this first, so no one is ever allowed to do it again" feels highly oppressive to me, and feels like that oldster taking away from the world more than they're giving. The process of invention and reinvention is highly productive, because of the selectivity of how good ideas (like wikis) keep getting reinvented while bad ideas (like XML) don't. Software, like science, advances one funeral at a time [1]. Once Oracle had built XML-capabilities into their databases and people started using them, could you imagine Oracle going "oh, on second thought, let's remove that and break backwards compatibility"? I can't. Nowadays you have tons of people trying to reinvent the database. Can you imagine any one of them going "Hey, let's pour a lot of man-hours into building XML support and convincing all our users to make heavy use of it"? I can't. That's a good thing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle