> He worked hard to enable software reuse. No one was interested in his idea of trying to monitor component use during runtime to pay developers.
This is a nice idea although I never thought it could've worked; it seems like it took forever for people to stop trying though. The app-and-library organization of software is more natural than document-and-component organization because of Conway's law, which is surprisingly hard to escape.
"No one was interested in his idea of trying to monitor component use during runtime to pay developers."
The way to make people pay for software components is not to ask them for money at runtime, but to do so much much earlier in the development cycle: at design time.
In the instances that I have seen this business model work, the components are usually bought as part of a collection [1]—think source-available components similar to the model made famous by Apache Commons (Commons Codec, Commons Util, Commons Lang etc). The Apache Commons OSS project emerged on June 20, 2007 [0] as a way of standardizing the need for reusable Java components and libraries, slowly killing the market of paid components.
Or, components are bought as part of an ongoing subscription to a large catalog containing thousands of components [1][2]—think of it as a company-wide Safari Books subscription but for software components.
As part of the business model, component designers and developers were paid royalties in additional to the one-time monetary payment for developing each component, with the top 25 royalty earners collectively making as much $458,792.31 over a multi-year period [3].
This is a nice idea although I never thought it could've worked; it seems like it took forever for people to stop trying though. The app-and-library organization of software is more natural than document-and-component organization because of Conway's law, which is surprisingly hard to escape.