The only place where software that the OP wants to create can reside is in the hobbyist community or free, open source community.
That was my instinctive reaction as well. Existing commercial models would not support this model of building software. I'm not sure most existing FOSS models would either.
Whether this is a problem is a different question. Maybe the kind of software that is interesting to a large enough group of people for this idea to be relevant should be created and developed by the community of its users, collaboratively, over a long period of time, without financial gain being their main incentive to contribute.
I think what the community behind this site is looking for is probably a form of social change more than technological change. There are lots of people out there who have the skills to contribute to software, and there are lots more people who might learn those skills given sufficient accessibility of the knowledge and awareness of the possibilities. Right now, it's just too difficult for the potential contributors to make actual contributions. I can think of many factors that play a part on that, but none that seems to be inherently impossible to overcome.
I largely agree with you here, and this entire thread has been an interesting read for me.
I’m actually writing what is turning out to be a research paper ( it started as a blog post ) about software development today.
What the OP is looking for _is_ a change, but it’s not just a change in society. It’s also how software development is viewed as a discipline and a career.
Very roughly put: software engineering is not a respected discipline, not to the level of other engineering disciplines. To create what the OP is looking for, The idea and viewpoint of software engineering needs to be changed as a whole.
To go into it more would be too much in a single post, and it’s part of the reason why I’m going down the rabbit hole with my paper.
I encourage you to share your paper when it's finished. This is an interesting discussion that I'd like to see more people joining.
For what it's worth, I don't think "software engineering" should be accorded the same respect as true engineering disciplines. What we do has little resemblance to real engineering in terms of either the systematic, tried and tested approach or the ethical foundation. It is something I think we should aspire to, but we are a long way from reaching that standard today.
That said, I don't think everyone needs to become a full-fledged software engineer to reach the goals set out in the linked piece. If we do ever achieve something like that, I think it will be because the core of the systems is carefully constructed by experts, and because it provides methods for "malleability" also carefully constructed by experts so that non-experts can use them. That recipe has proved successful in the past, in a wide range of applications from game mods to Excel macros, and I see no reason in principle that it couldn't be used much more widely for other types of software if there is some incentive for the experts to build the core and the extensibility framework around it.
That was my instinctive reaction as well. Existing commercial models would not support this model of building software. I'm not sure most existing FOSS models would either.
Whether this is a problem is a different question. Maybe the kind of software that is interesting to a large enough group of people for this idea to be relevant should be created and developed by the community of its users, collaboratively, over a long period of time, without financial gain being their main incentive to contribute.
I think what the community behind this site is looking for is probably a form of social change more than technological change. There are lots of people out there who have the skills to contribute to software, and there are lots more people who might learn those skills given sufficient accessibility of the knowledge and awareness of the possibilities. Right now, it's just too difficult for the potential contributors to make actual contributions. I can think of many factors that play a part on that, but none that seems to be inherently impossible to overcome.