> It would be untenable to produce software for profit if any of your employees could walk off with your source code after your investment and set up a competing business selling the same thing at a cut rate.
You can still ask your employees to keep things secret, of course. Just without government as your enforcer. What would generally happen is you'd have to sweeten the terms of employment to make sure your people are happy. Profits for existing shareholders would drop, probably significantly, but the market would still churn out goods as before, and wages would rise.
> with the exception of a few programs
I would say at this point the majority of important software are not protected by trade secrets (TCP/IP, Linux Kernel, XNU Kernel, Git, DNS, SQLite, MySQL to name a few of many thousands). Tens of thousands of people are paid to work on these open source software products, and yet generally remain with their employers, even though they could "walk out the door" at any moment.
Secrets are fine. Government enforcement of secrets I find highly questionable, and only in the interests of the 1%.
All the software you cited is basically server infrastructure software. I suppose that depending on your definition of important, you could say that this is the majority of important software. Perhaps if important includes only what is needed to develop web properties. But there are a lot of people who use software besides web developers. I don't really buy that your list names even close to the majority of important software by most folks' reckoning of what's important.
Some important (to me and many other people) software you didn't mention:
* Everything besides generic infrastructure that makes
any web property work (Google, Bing, Netflix, Facebook,
Amazon, DropBox, Personal Capital, etc.).
* Microsoft Windows
* Microsoft Office
* Mac OS X
* Nearly all games
* Nearly everything that makes any given bank work
* The Adobe Creative Suite
* Any popular Android or iOS app
I'd guess that the number of people working on the pieces of software I mention here exceeds those working on your list by at least one if not two or three orders of magnitude. I doubt much of it would be economically viable except for government protection of intellectual property.
Anyway, fortunately, the government will likely to continue to protect IP in the foreseeable future. It's working pretty well so far.
You can still ask your employees to keep things secret, of course. Just without government as your enforcer. What would generally happen is you'd have to sweeten the terms of employment to make sure your people are happy. Profits for existing shareholders would drop, probably significantly, but the market would still churn out goods as before, and wages would rise.
> with the exception of a few programs
I would say at this point the majority of important software are not protected by trade secrets (TCP/IP, Linux Kernel, XNU Kernel, Git, DNS, SQLite, MySQL to name a few of many thousands). Tens of thousands of people are paid to work on these open source software products, and yet generally remain with their employers, even though they could "walk out the door" at any moment.
Secrets are fine. Government enforcement of secrets I find highly questionable, and only in the interests of the 1%.