There has to be change to create value.

If there is no change, then the effort was invested once to create value.

It's possible to continue charging for that value, but increasingly unfairly.

Charging for more value than you create erodes what you're offering.

Static things don't create value, they can only have their value harvested (potentially killing them if you harvest too much).

Note that in the physical world, all production activities have an underlying change.

You move atoms around in space, changing their capabilities and configuration and location, creating value.

But in software, it's possible to not have any change after the initial act of creation.

If you've built a thing once that never needs to change, you can't charge as much as you want for it.

There has to be a change (marginal cost to the creator) to have a sustainable extraction of marginal price.

If there isn't, it's unsustainable harvesting.

If there is, it's regenerative.

In an old essay I covered these topics as tools vs services.

You might say that a tool is static.

A service is one where the creator continues investing marginal effort to improve it and can thus charge for it.

Sometimes an ecosystem invests marginal effort, even if the creator of the original product doesn't.

But if the ecosystem can't be accessed except via the product, the product creator can still sustainably harvest value, even though their investment is static.

This is called an aggregator.