Do you think that the growing size and complexity of software might be part of the strategy of those profiting from the suppression of free software, rather than a necessity for increased software quality?
Not the poster in question, but I think some of it might just be the "big ball of mud" of long maintained software, and some of it may indeed be the managerial structures around software, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and find problems for them to solve, regardless of the need of either the growth of team size, or the so-called problems.
And we all know bored developers will make up work for themselves and bikeshed themselves to death.
> a strategy
I don't think it's conspiratorial, so much as emergent. All structures which persist have means of ensuring their persistence. Institutions (including open ones) will push for things that further their existence, status, funding, and ultimately their power. They will make themselves indispensable, regardless of their actual value-added.
Linux kernel today is more complicated than 25 years ago. Is it conspiracy or necessity?
In a modern product engineering process we in fact fight the increasing complexity by selecting for the implementation only features that have the biggest business impact. That code is created because someone is going to use it to address some user need, not to confuse a potential reader. Nobody thinks at the moment of the roadmap planning about harming free software, this idea is just absurd.
