[rickmode]

The answer, I think, is warranties. As soon as software can no longer be delivered “as-is”, the profession will need to change. Hobbies will still exist, just as they do for almost all other professions, but as soon as software is required to be fit for purpose, we will need to get serious. That’s when regulation and (gasp) licensing will need to come in to play.

As soon as, say, a retailer or a bank can be sued to oblivion for bad and/or insecure software, whether it was written in-house or not, the regulations will flow back to the producers of the software.

We are still in the Wild West days. Enjoy it while it lasts. Once we, as a society, start requiring software to actually do what it says it does, the fun times are over…at least professionally. We will still be able to have hobby projects automating sprinklers and lightbulbs and such with the latest unlicensed (edit: un-warrantied, really) Raspberry Pi and Linux.

But at work we will be using buttoned down OSes, programming with buttoned down programming languages, using a (comparatively) small number of professionally licensed third-party libraries, and all this with some painful professionally certified software development methodology.

Edit: for clarity.

[Dracophoenix]

I'm not convinced. As long as someone is capable of inventing a new programming language, new libraries, or a new computer paradigm, there will always be a Wild West. If computers operated on the logic of "what's popular today will stay popular tomorrow", COBOL and Ada would be where C and Python are today.

Buttoned-down OSs existed in the form of mainframes and minicomputers up to the 90s (I'm sure you know what happened to those). Government and corporate standardization often fails more than it succeeds (e.g. respectively, OSI and CORBA), and will eventually follow the trends of the commercial market anyways. Until governments start inventing their own operating systems with 60 years of code and multiple versions of multiple programming languages and standards to reimplement, I wouldn't be so worried.

Right now, state governments and federal agencies are panicking to find COBOL practitioners. That should tell you how even respectable stations can become ghost towns.