Like Professor Moglen, I think that human beings like to share. I wonder, though, if the abundance of free software is dependent on the large number of people who have studied computers for profit-seeking purposes. Creating software requires technical expertise. People sought this technical expertise in order to increase their monetary gains. If the computing industry becomes less profitable, there will be fewer computer programmers. There will, consequently, be fewer computer programmers to write free software. Ultimately, the removal of profiteering opportunities would reduce productivity.

Although the free distribution of software is more optimal for the production of software in the short-term due to the increased number of people who can offer improvements to the code, it is less productive in the long-term since fewer people will obtain the technical knowledge required to write code if it is less profitable. Like statistics and mathematics, it will be extremely important, but fewer people will try to obtain the technical expertise required to offer innovations in the field. Curious students all over the world will still want to learn how to write code, but the absolute number of software programmers will decrease as people look for other ways to feed their families. Software innovations, like mathematical or statistical innovations, will occur, but at a slower pace.

My argument assumes that software innovation, like mathematics, is difficult and requires a great deal of expertise. If everyone, regardless of education level, can contribute to writing code, then my argument would be significantly weakened. Personally, I feel like if I wanted to contribute to the free software movement, it would have to be through legal services or monetary support and that I offer little value to the code itself. I want to share, but I do not know how. I think that it will require significant additional education, education that I will not obtain due to the costs involved.

Even if it were true that people like me could help write code, we would have to empirically weigh the benefit of a greater number of people working together against the loss of a larger number of people who have devoted their entire lives and livelihood to this field. I believe that Professor Moglen likes to analogize computer code to mathematics. To an outsider like myself, it seems like mathematics is a decrepit field that few people will study whereas software programming is a robust field with constant innovation. Of course there are significant and important differences between mathematics and software programming, but are these differences relevant to ensuring that coding will continue to be profitable?

What do you guys think?

-- StevenWu - 05 Oct 2009

I could be wrong, but I bet most programmers in industry don't work on out-of-the-box consumer software, but rather making custom applications for businesses. That work won't go away as the plug is gradually pulled on software as a consumer good. It is, however, hard to seriously argue with the conclusion that MSFT and Oracle employ a lot of programmers, and if you set their revenue to zero, they will employ a lot fewer.

But, my thinking during the lecture was similar to yours (roughly "boy, we're going to need a lot more programmers.") Becoming a programmer is actually pretty cheap, I think (see MIT's open courseware, for instance) although graduating from, say, Columbia with a degree in Computer Science is a somewhat different economic proposition. Of course, "cost" also encompasses time and effort. It should also encompass opportunity cost, or the cost of misallocation: I am a bad programmer, but I may be a decent lawyer, and it would be a waste to force everyone to become programmers. It is as if to abolish store-bought bread and decree that everyone shall learn to bake their own.*

I'm pretty sure I watched some nerdy science fiction movie/tv that showed programmers from the future, hard at work. They were sitting in VR booths and manipulating colored shapes with funny gestures. I don't know if eventually most programming will get away from staring at phonebooks of syntax, but perhaps in the future we shall. See: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere.html

*I am not a good baker, either.

-- HarryLayman - 06 Oct 2009