Software Reuse is like Nuclear Fusion. Both address major problems (software
crisis, energy crisis). Both already work at certain (coarse) levels of
granularity (shrinkwrapped applications, fusion weapons). And neither scales to
smaller levels of granularity because of the same unresolved issue; the
supply-side return-on-investment is negative. So long as there is no robust
infrastructure capable of incentivizing people to invest in building truly
reusable software, research on demand-side issues (languages, repositories,
classification schemes) will continue to achieve disappointing results.
An infrastructure for admistering a pay-by-use revenue stream for software is
presented, which is loosely modeled after the role ASCAP/BMI play for the music
industry.