ideas-programmingFaculty

I see programming as economically similar to scientific research; it is expensive to do, but once done, the marginal cost of reproducing the final product (information: knowledge in one case, programs in another) is negligable. Government funding of researchers is the system which produces most of scientific knowledge. I think the same should be applied to software. I am suggesting that programming become a function of the university system, and that we should have tenured faculty whose promotion is based not on the production of original, interesting knowledge, but rather on the production of useful software code.

Just as the knowledge produced by government funds is freely available for private industry to make use of (at least, it was, until the recent sad trend of universities patenting government-funding discoveries), the code produced should be public domain.

Some details: