We can vote for different politicians after a few years. The politicians can vote to remove laws that were problems. There’s a straight-forward solution to that.

Building critical features on a single, closed-standard database means you can’t leave unless you rewrite all code that relied on it. The new code must integrate in the system well. The change must also happen without taking down the business.

For these reasons, politicians and laws change regularly but companies rarely escape database lockin.