There's an even bigger elephant in the room: software is a non-scarce, non-rivalrous (possibly even anti-rivalrous in that utility increases with usage) good. Per-unit software sales and most standard proprietary software business models are deadweight losses that rely on unsustainably preserving artificial scarcity.
The technical community has mostly accepted that file sharing is a reality that requires rethinking business models, and that DRM is an act of desperation to put old strategies on life support by restricting playback device manufacturers.
But for proprietary versus free software, many remain outright hostile.
Just like the typical plumber or electrician, most programming is not "new products". Even today, most programming is probably Java (formerly Cobol) internal to a business or other large organization.
There will always be a need for programmers, for much the same reason we will always need plumbers: even with standardized parts and methods, you still need someone to actually customize it to the specific task and implement it locally.
This is where Free Software comes in: we need a commons from which those implementations can be built from. Unfortunately, we still have a lot of sociopathic businesses in the market that think it would be really profitable if they make the threads on all their pipe fittings in the reverse direction at non-standard sizes with the hope of cornering the entire pipe market. In practice, of course, all they've accomplished is forcing every plumber to keep a huge set of adapters in their toolkit and waste a lot of time matching them on every job.
The technical community has mostly accepted that file sharing is a reality that requires rethinking business models, and that DRM is an act of desperation to put old strategies on life support by restricting playback device manufacturers.
But for proprietary versus free software, many remain outright hostile.
Business models for privacy-respecting user-centric free software are possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...
They might not be amazingly profitable. However, the reality is, the programmer is heading the way of the musician and the artist.