Anything that moves us towards the professionalization of Software Engineering as a bad thing, and against the public good. Nothing has served the interests of

Anything that moves us towards the professionalization of Software Engineering as a bad thing, and against the public good. Nothing has served the interests of privacy, openness and security more than the fact that anyone can become a programmer, without any certification or required education. We are a bottom up industry where big projects can be built and maintained by the efforts of engineers, without the approval of any corporation or professional body. Ethics are not always something that are valuable to formalize and teach. We should resist professionalization not just because it is driven by rent seekers who want to make their cut from accreditation and mandatory courses, but because it attacks the very roots of the hacker tradition.