The buyer of software has active disincentives - some of those to the level of national security - to not participate in some collective action to create a library of software for everyone to use.
And at some point, you learn to make the software critically dependent not on lines of code doing their thing, but rather to push all the complexity out to the configuration. So now you have man-hours and company profits depending on maintaining a configuration. That's even more ephemeral than code, so it gets even worse.
And at some point, you learn to make the software critically dependent not on lines of code doing their thing, but rather to push all the complexity out to the configuration. So now you have man-hours and company profits depending on maintaining a configuration. That's even more ephemeral than code, so it gets even worse.