The Death of Programming

One thing I’ve noticed about programmers: they can’t kick the habit — the coding habit, that is.

That statement should expose the fact that I’m not a programmer. I may have dipped my toes in BASIC and assembly language, and I can write bash scripts, but I don’t have the patience, doggedness, and outside-the-box creativity that makes for a brilliant programmer.

There’s also one more quality that I’ve noticed in the best programmers: they just love to code.

It’s not easy to stop programmers from doing what they love to do. Poor pay can make things difficult, but this obstacle can be — and very often is — overcome. Many (very many) programmers even work for free. Lousy corporate management, while it can cause much dissatisfaction among developers, just drives them away to work for someone else. And when a programming language slips out of favor, learning a new language is a quick solution to that problem. Many (if not most) decent developers know several programming languages.

A good programmer always finds opportunities to code; usually, some form of economic compensation can be found as well.

Is there anything that can kill off programming?

Yes there is and I can name it in two words: Software Patents.

Software patents are the one sweeping legal instrument that can be used to shackle programmers — and back up that immoral imposition with legal force. It is used to restrict innovation in one of the largest software development markets in the world: the United States. To make things worse, tts advocates (and beneficiaries) are pushing other countries to adopt software patents.

Mike Gunderloy, a former Microsoft developer, saw just how dangerous software patents are. His experience and thoughts on the matter were the subject of a recent Linux.com story, “Veteran developer ditches Microsoft for open source“:

The beginning of the end for the developer was when Microsoft went patent berserk. “What finally pushed me over the edge to ‘I’m getting out’ was when Microsoft started to assert non-intellectual property rights over the its Ribbon interface, making that level of sweeping intellectual property claims. Microsoft went from not patenting much to patenting everything,” Gunderloy says.

Microsoft essentially tried to patent the new Ribbon interface that appeared on Office 2007 products. The Ribbon is a series of controls for various functions of Office programs. Redmond, Gunderloy says, “basically told any control vendor that wanted to make a control that the Ribbon was Microsoft property and they had to license it from Microsoft. They had to acknowledge that Microsoft owns that piece of the user interface. I said to myself, that’s nuts. You may have copyright rights in code, but the arrangement of controls in the user interface is not something that’s intellectual property.”

If that happened, Gunderloy reasoned, it could become impossible for a developer to write any code that didn’t tread on some vendor’s patent somewhere. “It was the sweeping land grab by Microsoft that pissed me off.”

He’s right to be angry. Sweeping software patent claims like Microsoft’s turn the programming landscape into a veritable minefield — you’ll never know when you’ll step on a nasty that will blow up in your face. I’ve tried reading some software patent filings. They are hard to understand, not because of the technical concepts involved, but because of the legalese in which they are written. It can be very difficult — if not close to impossible — to make sure that a software project does not infringe on some patent somewhere.

The article cited earlier also ends with a very insightful comment from Gunderloy:

By bucking Microsoft for open source, says Gunderloy, “I’m no longer contributing to the eventual death of programming.”

Make no mistake about it: software patents, if widely adopted, can and will strangle programming. At the very least, it will stifle innovation and independent creativity. Many programmers will be forced to hide behind the protection of large companies who can afford to fight off patent claims. Those who don’t work for the big software manufactuers will have to do their coding anonymously or in relative obscurity, flyuing under the radar of patent sharks. The independent developer (or small group of developers) will be an endangered species, under constant threat of litigation.

Remember that next time you hear someone from the Business Software Alliance (BSA) spout some garbage about how software patents help protect developers.