[ds9]

He makes a good point that one more competent developer is much more valuable than multiple incompetent devs.

The first part of the piece, about how much software is needed and for how many uses, suggests another point he does not make -- namely that there is a lot of redundancy. In the universe of softare, how many independently developed, duplicative solutions to essentially the same functionality, code pattern or use case are there? Probably quite a lot, right?

The efforts of the limited number of good devs societies have on tap, obviously would go a lot further if there were more re-use and sharing. I know I'm an idealistic outlier in believing software should never have been deemed copyrightable, but the more we go in the "Free" direction - with GPL/BSD type licences and such - the better off we'll all be, in a macro view.