That&#x27;s not the point, the point is that the effort required makes it harder to innovate and that not only does that limit competition but it also enable proprietarism.<p>In a perfect world you could just e-mail the data without any concerns of authenticity, privacy, robustness etc. But you can&#x27;t, so you would have to bring in a huge firm that is going to spend a lot of money and effort getting everything right or at least certified. Of course with all that effort they now have a huge incentive to keep thing proprietary since they want to recuperate their cost and the large barrier to entry make it even more advantageous because there will be little competition.<p>Innovation often requires COTS components to be available at a sufficient standard. No one would doubt this when it comes to something like AWS or how Tesla could make such a high level car in a relatively short time. Of course if you question the state of software you get downvoted into oblivion without reason on HN.<p>And if it wasn&#x27;t clear, these (proprietary) systems very much exists.