The software industry has perfected a peculiar form of value extraction that emerges not through direct coercion or byzantine contract provisions, but through the accumulated weight of community contributions that inadvertently reinforce ecosystem boundaries.

We call it…

“Lazy Lock-in”

Unlike traditional vendor lock-in, which relies on proprietary formats or contractural switching costs, this phenomenon arises from the very generosity and creativity of open source contributors. The irony of this is that those purveyors that capitalize on this now once ridiculed and structurally resisted open development for many years. Now it’s one of the unspoken keys to the value they extract from their ecosystems.

Consider how modern hyperscaler platforms operate: thousands of developers contribute libraries, tools, and frameworks under permissive licenses, genuinely intending to help their peers. Yet each contribution adds another thread to a web that makes leaving the ecosystem progressively more burdensome for businesses that come to depend on them. The corporate platform owner benefits from this free labor without explicitly requesting it. And the final insult is that this entrapment isn’t engineered; it’s emergent as a toxic by-product of good will.

Extractive Asymmetry

This model creates a fundamental asymmetry. Contributors donate their time and expertise, receiving community recognition and the satisfaction of solving problems. The platform owner, however, captures the actual value: increased adoption, reduced support costs, and most critically, elevated switching barriers for commercial users. Every package published is another reason a business can’t easily migrate away.

The corporate extraction is subtle but real. When a company chooses a platform for a project, they’re not just choosing the vendor’s work – they’re choosing the unpaid work of thousands. Platform owners capture the commercial value of this choice through licenses, cloud services, and enterprise agreements, while the actual creators of much of the value receive very little if any recognition. This contributor-capture dynamic has become so normalized that we rarely question it.

Why This Model Is Reaching Its Limits

Three converging forces are eroding the foundations of this extractive cycle:

1. Developer Awareness

The current generation of developers increasingly recognize these dynamics. They’ve watched too many projects get absorbed, abandoned, or exploited. The goodwill that platform ecosystems depend on is a finite resource, and vendors have been overdrawing their accounts. Developers now think twice before contributing to ecosystems where the value flow is unidirectional. This is easily seen in the “rug-pull” licensing changes of Redis and Elasticsearch. There are others where the social contract have been strained or broken.

2. Technical Liberation

The emergence of technologies that target emergent hardware platforms fundamentally changes the equation. Projects like our Fidelity framework demonstrate this shift – by compiling F# through MLIR and LLVM to native code, we sidestep runtime dependencies entirely. More importantly, we show how modern languages can integrate with the vast, vendor-neutral ecosystems of C and C++ libraries that have evolved over decades. Many critical libraries in the .NET ecosystem simply “wrap” those low-level libraries, and Fidelity leverages them directly in a “pay only for what you use” computational model.

This approach offers something revolutionary: the ability to statically bind to battle-tested libraries without carrying decades old platform baggage. When you can directly integrate the huge body of C/C++ development work through our binding generation, the supposed convenience of platform-specific packages are shown for what they are - a vestige of the past. That aggregated dependency weight which keeps developers trapped in those walled gardens becomes a historical relic that can be easily set aside in the new paradigm.

3. Economic Pressure

As software becomes more critical to every business, the hidden costs of ecosystem entrapment become more visible on balance sheets. CFOs are asking harder questions about why their infrastructure costs scale with vendor stock prices rather than actual usage. What once seemed like a convenient default now looks like an expensive liability. And while many hyperscalers often use loss-leading pricing tactics to lure customers in - only to raise rates once lock-in has been achieved, our approach allows teams full portability in choosing where they place their mission-critical workloads. With each passing quarterly statement, the hype of hyperscalers become less and less convincing.

The Coming Shift

Perhaps most critically, the explosion of new computing architectures is rendering traditional platform strategies obsolete. The current AI revolution has transformed chip design from a math problem into a computer architecture problem, with companies rushing to create specialized processors that balance compute, memory bandwidth, and energy efficiency in novel ways.

These new architectures – from AI accelerators using analog compute to processors with in-memory processing capabilities – require fundamentally different programming models. Traditional runtime-heavy platforms simply cannot adapt quickly enough to this cambrian explosion of hardware diversity. Companies are developing everything from wafer-scale processors with 4 trillion transistors to edge AI chips that process data locally, each requiring unique optimization strategies.

This hardware revolution exposes the fatal flaw in lazy lock-in: it assumes a stable, homogeneous computing substrate. But when every major cloud provider is designing custom silicon, when edge computing demands radically different architectures than data centers, and when energy efficiency becomes as important as raw performance, “virtual machine” runtimes are exposed as a one-trick-pony.

The irony is striking. Platform vendors built their empires on the assumption that they could abstract away hardware complexity. But as computing becomes more heterogeneous – with specialized accelerators for AI, quantum processors on the horizon, and edge devices proliferating – this abstraction becomes a prison. Developers need the flexibility to target specific architectures, optimize for particular memory hierarchies, and exploit hardware-specific features. The comfortable ecosystem that once provided convenience now prevents adaptation.

Sustainable Platform Strategies

Forward-thinking approaches must evolve beyond extraction to genuine value exchange:

• Explicit value sharing: If a platform profits from community contributions, contributors should receive more than lip service from the platform providers
• True portability: Standards and compilation strategies that allow work to move between platforms and architectures without loss
• Transparent governance: Clear guidelines on how community work is used, who benefits and how commercial operation informs sustainability of the project
• Architecture agility: The ability to target new hardware platforms without rewriting entire codebases

The emergence of projects that compile to native code while maintaining the ability to integrate vast existing ecosystems points the way forward. By treating C and C++ libraries as a shared foundation rather than something to be wrapped and trapped, it demonstrates that powerful engineering options need not create adverse dependence.

Conclusion

The twilight of this extractive model isn’t just about fairness – it’s about sustainability. As AI workloads drive the development of domain-specific architectures and heterogeneous computing becomes the norm, platforms that cannot provide genuine portability and hardware flexibility will be abandoned by necessity, not choice.

The question isn’t whether this model will end, but whether platform owners will proactively build more equitable and flexible systems or be forced to watch as developers route around them entirely. The technical foundations for the latter are already being laid – one native compilation, one portable binding, one architecture-agnostic design at a time.

In a world where computing architectures are proliferating faster than any single platform can support them, the ability to escape ecosystem constraints isn’t just convenient – it’s essential. The platforms that thrive in the next decade will be those that enable this escape rather than prevent it.