IMHO only, as an idealistic aside: It would be lovely to see a society in which programming was done as civil service, in a program similar to Americorps or Peace Corps or what the old CCC did: provide public infrastructure using public funds.

Programming reminds me of other professions with high inputs but low per-unit-cost outputs: teaching, music, movies, art, journalism, etc. -- basically anything that is create-once, share-often. All those (for the most part) are things that America's shortsightedly capitalist economy fail to adequately incentivize/reward unless you happen to become a celebrity.

There is already, and will continue to be, a class of human labor output that is intrinsically valuable but which our economy is unable to adequately price. I'd argue that's more an issue with the speculation-driven economy that we have than with the labor in question. It'll only get more drastic we we automate more and more and further amplify human creativity.

It'd be cool to see a nonprofit search engine/email service/office suite/whatever funded in a similar style as NPR, but of course that'd run into political issues at every level.

In an utopian cyberpunk future, what if there were multiple voluntary nonprofit "shadow governments" that you can choose to tithe every month, almost like churches? You can choose between e-governments red, blue, green, yellow, purple, gray, whatever... give them 1% of your income a year in exchange for a suite of services run and staffed by professionals who are salaried but own no equity; they work as a form of civil service, not a wealth-building scheme. Syndicates for the public good, I suppose. Lol, in all the video games, these usually turn into private military companies with killer androids, but what if they just, uh, provided really good email (and automatic online driver's license renewals) instead?

Such systems would probably never be able to attract the best talent (unless they turn into something like Mozilla, which is a big enterprise masquerading as a nonprofit), but you often don't NEED the best. Wikipedia, the sum total of human knowledge, is also the sum total of human mediocrity (with plenty of redundant efforts, infighting, unoptimized problems, etc.). But having stable collaborative communities is something that is critical for producing works of intrinsic value, and developing slow-trickle funding streams for such communities -- the kind that can sustain without turning them into potential get-rich-quick schemes, or subject them to violent boom-bust cycles -- is what allows them to both keep working effectively, AND keeps away the exploitative get-rich-quick types looking to subvert public labor for personal gain.

We need a funding model that provides enough income to attract people who want to do it for the public good, but not so much that it also attracts people who want to turn it into personal wealth. In high-input, low-per-unit-cost services, optimizing for maximum (as opposed to sufficient) monetization will too often mean that the users themselves become the product, as we see time and again with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and basically the entire modern online economy. It's the difference between Amazon and your local library, Oracle and Postgres, EvilOS and Linux, etc.

Things don't have to be artificially scarce if we can learn to ask, "How can I make this as widely accessible as possible while ensuring I have my own basics needs covered?" instead of "How can I make this as monetarily valuable as possible?"

There are always going to be people who want to just do things to make the world a better place, just as surely as there are always going to be people who want to optimize for personal profit. We have every system to fund the latter, but not so much the former right now. Is the for-profit business model the only, or best, way?