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Great software projects are never finished; instead they always evolve and improved similarly to living organisms and unsimilar to material things.

I completely disagree with your analogy to a carpenter who builds a chair, this metaphor is wrong and responsible for a lot of misunderstandings when it comes to software development.

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How about the words "fully baked"?

I also don't agree that "finish your program" needs to be added to the unix philosophy because a tool that does one thing and does it well is finished by definition.

Except very trivial cases, any piece of software contains bugs that need to be fixed needs to add features based on new user stories and also must to adopt to the constantly evolving hardware. Linux is a perfect example of this constantly evolving and never finished paradigm and if anything it can be used not to support but to invalidate the "finish your program" philosophy.

Many great software projects are never finished. All un-great project remain unfinished.

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