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Comment by bolangi | Hacker News Reader

This 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.

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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.

The comment you replied to said "significant portion of" and I believe it is clear which portion that refers to: the culture around c, linux, vim and bash, not things like nodejs, java and (semi-open-source) elasticsearch which are culturally separate.

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.

The formal term that business people use is "institutional knowledge".

Now it's just... context.

The term is Institutional knowledge. "An organization's collective memory, encompassing the unique expertise, experiences, processes, and cultural insights built over time by its members, acting as a vital asset that guides operations, decision-making, and continuity, often residing in seasoned employees' tacit understanding but also in documented procedures and data. It includes deep technical skills..."

Institutional knowledge is scoped to members of an organization and covers things related specifically to the institution's operations. What I'm talking about is the knowledge of the general population, often as it relates to an institution's products.

For instance, tons of people know how to use Adobe products like Photoshop, by way of deliberate inaction on the part of Adobe around product piracy outside of workplaces. With this large knowledge pool entering into the workforce, users were able to convince workplaces to adopt Adobe products that they were already familiar with.

That wouldn't be institutional knowledge, but a pool of knowledge that institutions could take actions (or inaction, as the case above) to influence.

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