'The man who wants to take your jobs'

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

My vision of the tech world was shaped in part by my debates with Stallman
back in 1982-83.  Today it could perhaps be summed up by the cliche "standing
on the shoulders of giants".

Stallman's ethic was, in essence, people should not have to pay for software,
and programmers should not be paid for it (at least not more than a token
amount like his own MIT stipend).  Back then, a typical software package cost
$20,000 and experienced programmers could write their own ticket salary-wise. 
So his ideas struck me as *radical*.  But yet I was drawn to the notion that
software should be freely available.

Suppose we lived in a world where mankind only had to write an Office suite
once.  An airline reservation system once.  A personal-organizer program once.
 One browser.  And so on.  I don't mean that the feature set would remain
static:  there would be many refinements over the years.  But instead of
rewriting the same basic utilities over and over again, folks would have
access to the work of their predecessors and could "stand on their shoulders"
to invent wholly new functionality.

Proprietary software has cut off access to much of this possibility in the
Microsoft world.  But the Gnu concept took off once Linux came out, and the
open-source vision has thrived.  Free-lance programmers do have a huge base of
code to work with.

However, the work of those programmers has been de-valued in the process.  Is
this inevitable?

I would say it is, most likely.  Once you've developed the basic stuff,
getting to "Hal 9000" artificial-intelligence is a quantum leap.  Once
everyone has a free office suite, browser, database utility, and high-def
video editing/playback suite--how much are we willing to pay for incremental
software capability?

The industry has matured and the reason work is devalued is that we've already
got 98% of what we need out of our computers.

Protectionism and job-training initiatives are not going to change this
fundamental aspect of the IT industry.  There will always be more to do, but
we've gotten past the explosive development stage of this business.

-rich