What's the point of developing software?
Fun and dollars.
the free availability should be motivation enough. it was for me.
I think the projection of self onto the societal-level of decision making gives us policy that only works for a few people. This is especially the case when you apply yourself as (presumably) an adult as a decent model for today's children. Their situation is invariably different from yours and using your own childhood as a model for a wide swath of today's youth is probably not going to match up to the needs and expectations of today.
Most of the problem is that sexual reproduction and evolution makes several contradictions with some really popular book that people take too literally.
There, fixed that for you. Also, the animals appear in the creation story in approximately the same order that evolution stipulates they would. Does it mean anything? I don't know, but it's not a flat out contradiction by a long shot. The contradictions exist in peoples' minds. The book you're talking about is too big and complex to contradict all but a few things.
Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks.