One thought that I've had, admittedly not fully considered, is that perhaps F/OSS is acting …

> Consumers want more features I no longer think that's true. Instead, I think consumers want reliability, but more features is a way to justify subscription pricing segregation and increases.

Adopting libraries and 3P solutions is like jumping in the pool, easy to do. Getting out of the pool is much harder. Or in some cases like jumping into quick sand. Sometimes it can be hard to tell which before you're in it.

Most large enterprise IT departments are fully aware that the cost of adopting yet another open source library is very high even if the price is zero. This cost comes in the form of developer training, dependency management, security breaches, patent troll lawsuits, etc. There is a whole niche industry of tools to help those organizations manage their open source bill of materials.

> Consumers want more features I’m not even sure if this is true anymore. We got new features foisted on us most of the time.

Interesting. My experience is that bulky abstraction layers are harder to maintain than own software. In game development, whenever we go with highly abstract middleware, it always ends up limiting us in what we can do, at what level of performance, how much we can steer it towards our hardware targets, and similar. Moreover, when teams become so lean that they can only do high level programming and something breaks close to the metal, I’ve seen even “senior” programmers in the AAA industry flail around with no idea how to debug it, and no skills to understand the low level code. I’ve seen gameplay programmers who don’t understand RAII and graphics programmers who don’t know how to draw a shape with OpenGL. Those are examples of core discipline knowledge lost in the games industry. Aka what we have now, we might not know anymore how to build from scratch. Or at least most software engine…