Software doesn’t die, because someone out there—someone its developers may not even be aware of—will continue to use it. The author Neal Stephenson once described Unix as “not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic . . . Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it.”192 Code is not a product to be bought and sold so much as a living form of knowledge.
