All intellectual property rights are just licenses granted by society because it was thought, rightly or wrongly, that society as a whole would benefit by granting them. The case of programs today is very different from that of books a hundred years ago. If the runners get into a fist fight, they will all finish late. Proprietary and secret software is the moral equivalent of runners in a fist fight. He really ought to break them up, and penalize runners for even trying to fight.
Programming has an irresistible fascination for some people, usually the people who are best at it.
There is no shortage of professional musicians who keep at it even though they have no hope of making a living that way. But really this question, though commonly asked, is not appropriate to the situation. Pay for programmers will not disappear, only become less. My experience shows that they will. For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have had anywhere else.