I don't think value to one's work is the issue. The issue is that he is making economic arguments without an economic knowledge base, and is making inappropriate analogies between law and software engineering. My full comments are here: http://itpers.blogspot.com/2005/03/software-engineering-is-not-law.html

While I can appreciate the stress this blogger is under (I am a third year law student myself, sitting for the patent agent registration exam in April and the state bar exam in July) I don't think agree with almost anything stated in the post.

Although it's true that the legal profession has a high barrier of entry, the fact that one makes it through to the end only proves that one was able to take a marginally relevant entrance examination, to read a lot, and to memorize material. In other words, it only shows that one is capable of being a lawyer. Nothing more. It _does not_ provide any basis of comparing your intelligence to that of others in different professions. While this may not have been this blogger's ultimate point, the fact that these allegedly difficult "hurdles" are mentioned clearly show a supremacist attitude. To believe that those in the legal profession are inherently "smarter" that the clients can only lead to non-lawyers (I dislike using the term "layman" or "lay person" because it bolsters this counterproductive attitude) being further disserviced by and dissatisfied with the lawyers.

The premise that "high schoolers can write software and give it away for free" is laughable. I'd like to see a high school student that can develop highly sophisticated software like Apache.

Perhaps there's more to the recent decrease in software engineers' salaries than anything attributable to open source - what about development occurring in foreign countries where labor and education is cheaper? What about economic downturn? How about reduced investor confidence in the software companies after the dotcom era, resulting in less capital flowing to such outfits? To claim that software engineers are being paid less because of open source is scapegoating and fear-mongering, plain and simple. As we all learned in law school so thoroughly, it's a totality of the circumstances.

At any rate, I'd like to see an open source application which "pirated" an proprietary application and ended up being more widely used.

"when you don’t value your own work, will others value it? " is glib but but presupposes two falsehoods, namely that money is the only kind of value, and that the only way to earn money from software is to sell it. Authors of free software are often motivated by the desire to earn the respect of other programmers, or by the desire to have software that better satisfies their own needs. In both cases the programmer receives non-monetary value.

By the same token, one could argue that lawyers who publish in law journals do not value their work because they give away their hard-earned knowledge and research. Are lawyers who publish in law reviews not so smart after all? Presumably the main benefits that a lawyer receives from publication are the satisfaction of craftsmanship and the respect of other legal scholars. Publication may convey a marginal benefit in terms of future income, but then the same is true of programmers.

In any case, it is not true that selling software is the only way to earn income from it. Programmers may be paid to write software in the first place, to install it, to port it, to extend and modify it, to teach other people to use it, and to advise clients on how best to meet their needs.
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