What is the breakdown of your software maintenance costs? One of my ideas is that we should package manage solutions to problems at a level higher than just co

What is the breakdown of your software maintenance costs? One of my ideas is that we should package manage solutions to problems at a level higher than just code and subscribe to them. We all depend on BSD sockets due to history. BSD sockets Just Works™ and people don't really evolve the BSD socket API over time. If only the rest of the software stack was as feature complete as BSD sockets. Imagine a labour market that was also a package manager. When library "xyz" upgrades from version 1.2.0 to 1.3.0 there's an interface change that breaks everybody. If there's 1,000 dependents of "xyz" and it takes 1 hour to upgrade and 1 hour to pass all QA tests and get into production, then that upgrade takes 1,000 man hours + 1,000 hours automated testing. If we don't depend on library "xyz" throughout our codebase, we reduce the number of callsites to change. If we use a facade, they're all in one place. If we use a Service Provider Interface, we isolate ourselves even more and add flexibility of implementation. If our facade or SPI is in escrow on a labour market, someone can fix it for us for a cost of their time. Ideally the software maintainer fixes it so they don't break so many people.