alt Hacker NewsThis thought-provoking essay does not consider one crucial aspect of software: the cost of a user developing a facility with a given software product. Historically monopolistic software producers can force these costs to be borne because the user has no alternative to upgrading to the latest version of, for example, Windows, or gmail, or the latest version of the github GUI. A signficant portion of the open source / free software movement is software providing stable interfaces (including for the user) so that resources otherwise spent on compulsory retraining to use the latest version of something proprietary, can be invested in configuring existing resources to better suit the user's problem domain. For example, programs like mutt or vim, or my latest discovery, talon.
Replies
I've never found a term I liked for this particular concept at the intersection of education & business so I made one up a while back:
A Knowledge Pool is the reservoir of shared knowledge that a group of people have about a particular subject, tool, method, etc. In product strategy, knowledge pools represent another kind of moat, and a form of leverage that can be used to grow or maintain market share.
Usage: Resources are better spent on other things besides draining the knowledge pool with yet another new interface to learn and spending time and money filling it up again with retraining.
I don't think the division line runs on the open-source software front here. Windows has historically offered some of the most stable APIs, meanwhile there's plenty of examples of popular open-source software with a lot of breaking changes.