My guess, the people most worried were never really good at their job and easy to replace.
The better S.E. know that silly business people may replace them with AI at first, then quickly realize they have NO IDEA on how to describe what the business needs.
I dealt with these people, they think they can describe their business in just a few words and get angry when you ask for more details, I can just imagine the mess they will make when a piece of software they THINK they own starts to ask detailed questions.
It is my understanding the the GEOS system was developed on a more powerful machine than the C64/Atari computers it was used on. This let then have the entire code in memory and then processed for common functions. They could not do this on the the 64K-8 bit computers at the time.
This does far more than I did back in my PET and then Amiga days, but one thing I did was write a multi-pass compiler. Each pass at first found ways to make the come better (usually smaller so it ran faster). Even simple code I wrote could see a 10-20% improvement.
Of-course, this is because the original code was quick and dirty. I wonder what improvement modern compilers could have added.
All I know. When I ask the business people what they want the program to do, the answer is so vague that any working program you write has a 99% chance of not being what they want.
Of-course the answer is to ask more questions, but I also know how these business people tend to think, they expect magic. A person who is a programmer can keep asking questions, but a machine? They will try to turn it off after a little while.
Good luck getting the EGO head that too many business head are to answer questions.
And if the job is move to someone lower in the organization, the answer to 50% of the questions asked will be 'I don't know.".
I worked at a job with a 5 hour work per day timetable. The problem was the handover to the next staff members after noontime. If any were late, then your own plans were messed up. I don't think many jobs can be changed to work with this.
Yes, if you look at the programs I submitted to BeBits you would see I included the source files, but I was the exception. Too many times I would see an interesting program but no source file so I could modify it to my needs.
I had an HP laptop that did that in Windows or Haiku. I rewired the fan to run 100% all of the time and aside from losing some battery time the laptop ran fine. And when plugged into the external power supply I would run it all weekend (4-days) non-stop with no problems.
Answer: Keep a copy of the open source code. The original developer may not even be the weak point. The server may go down, the comm link may be flakey, a local copy means you have something to reference at all times.
The better S.E. know that silly business people may replace them with AI at first, then quickly realize they have NO IDEA on how to describe what the business needs.
I dealt with these people, they think they can describe their business in just a few words and get angry when you ask for more details, I can just imagine the mess they will make when a piece of software they THINK they own starts to ask detailed questions.