In the craving of corporate entities to pursue cost saving measures, Information Technology (IT) professionals are called to be more than simply code writers. Each must search his or her own conscience and ethical fabric before simply following orders in todays yet-to-be-sorted-out "legal rights" fiasco. While the courts continue to deliberate, programmers must decide for themselves where they stand on such issues as the aiding and abetting of the export of jobs overseas, the flagrant abuse of copyright and patent laws, and the simple issue of plagiarism and whether it is morally acceptable to steal someone else's work without paying for it or even giving appropriate credit to the original authors. The easy road is to blindly follow orders and shift the responsibility to the company lawyers and bosses, or risk being labeled a whistle blower or worse. But even putting the moral, ethical and legal aspects aside, each developer must assess whether or not fulfillment can be found by simply reverse-engineering, copying, or otherwise reproducing another's work. A bigger issue is at stake as well, that affects more than just the single programmers ability to sleep at night. Do we do the entire craft a disservice by allowing corporate thieves to reduce the essence of our art to insignificance? If the entire field is reduced to simple minded code copy and method mimicry, our science is reduced to the level of an amateurish soap opera, and our pay scales will quickly reflect the loss of innovation and cutting-edge invention. As the writing on the wall grows ever more clear, Mike found himself disenfranchised by the corporate entities that increasingly admitted they could not even understand what the role of a developer should be, aside from copying and duplicating the work of competitors. And so in October of 2006, 20 years to the day from signing on with the MetaWare compiler team, Mike found himself left to his own devices to begin to reinvent the 2nd half of his career.
