I've been looking at this story for days, wondering what to make of it. (That's a Techtoon from a happier time.)

First, it's true. My dear wife is a programmer and morale is down at her place. There's real fear out there. There's fear of India, but more than that, fear of being replaced by someone younger and cheaper.

"Do you know they don't even call themselves programmres?" she asked me one night. "Now they're developers."

Yet at the same time these should be the best of times for programmers, or developers, or whatever. (This picture is from a page on weight loss although, I know, the man in the picture isn't fat.)

• We've never had so much hardware that needed programming.
  
• We've never had so much old stuff out there that needed to be maintained.
  
• We've never had so many opportunities to do great new applications.
  
• We've never had such need for those great, new applications.
  

As we age, and we're doing that rapidly, we have more need for these applications. The cost of home health care and nursing home care is already crippling millions of families. We need some way to make those people more productive.

And that's just for starters.

Imagine what we'll be able to do when wireless networking is universal -- when cognitive radios can find the network, regardless of whether it's cellular or Wi-Fi or whatever. Imagine what we'll be able to do next year, when cellular phones enter the computing mainstream. Imagine what we can do with new interfaces, like our own voice, and how that will benefit us.

Now imagine how badly the world needs all this stuff. We have to cut our energy use, drastically, so the value of any application that cuts energy use is going to skyrocket. The same is true for water. We have to clean the air. Both my kids are using inhalers, and it's not because they're bad people or genetically inferior -- they were born into this bad air and it's killing us, killing all of us.

The needs are immense, the opportunities are immense, the capabilities are immense -- yet programmers (sorry, developers) remain depressed.

Why?

I think it's because of the barriers to competition we've been erecting these last few years. Every piece of code is copyrighted, every business model is patented. Whole industries now exist to stop new programs from being written and marketed. (And the fellow who many believe started it all is right here -- Mickey Mouse was launched in this 1928 cartoon (buy the poster here) yet under the DMCA he's still copyrighted. Why should a mouse outlive us all?)

These are unnatural barriers to entry that scare capital away from this industry, at the same time capital should be flowing in faster than it did at the height of the dot-com bubble.

I hate to harp on political issues, I really do. Especially since the "enemies" in these cases aren't all Republicans, but Democrats (like Patrick Leahy) who've been "bought" by the media trust, the software trust, and the rest.

The opportunities to be found in ignoring these industries are becoming irresistible. They are an irresistible opportunity to Indian entrepreneurs, to Russian entrepreneurs, to Chinese entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs don't have access to much capital, yet, and they don't have access to nearly as many trained minds as you think. (Indians are good coders, but most have no experience in design. My wife can run rings around any 10 of 'em, because she can explain what she does in English and break it down.)

Yet programmers (sorry, developers) remain depressed.

And they have good reason to be. Because the people they work for are, in their short term greed, giving away the game. And they can't do thing one about it.

Until we unleash entrepreneurs from the tyranny of entrenched interests, we're going to remain depressed.

What do you plan on doing about it?