> professional obligation is not to dilute the value of your services by offering them for free.

So all of the volunteers who work on open-source projects in their spare time are in violation of their professional obligations?

Guys with the guts to quit their jobs and try to bootstrap a company totally on spec are in violation of their professional obligations?

People who volunteer to provide free technical skills to schools, hospitals, libraries and orphanages in desperately poor Third World countries are in violation of their professional obligations?

Bloggers who write about cool programming ideas for people to read, for free, are in violation of their professional obligations?

This "obligation" simply doesn't make sense.

And besides, the "market value" you cite only exists because buyers and sellers of services are able to freely negotiate with each other to decide on a price.

There is a definite obligation, as a licensed professional engineer, to protect the reputation, and to an extent the scarcity, of engineering knowledge as a resource. I know for sure that, as an architect, it is unethical to do architecture work for friends, family, etc. for free. The examples you gave are straw men, though, except open source.

- Open Source is a really interesting problem, and I'm not involved in that community very much. I suspect a licensed engineer would be averse to writing code for an OS project in their spare time, if it wasn't part of their job.

- Quitting your job and working for yourself isn't the same as offering your services to a third party for free / cheap. If a lawyer was actually an equity partner in a firm, they could set their own salary, certainly it could be less than usual. This is different than what I saw as a contracting/retainer relationship where the lawyer is an independent third-party providing services because they have some free time. Of course, there is probably a lot of red tape involved in creating an in-hour legal department versus contracting this out.

- Providing services to charity, inarguably, provides a net benefit to the profession. Most professional organizations allow for this, provided you're acting in an advisory role. Arguably, actually getting involved in litigation is no longer 'advisory'.

- Writing about cool things and implementing them are two different ideas. Some lawyers provide commentary as a hobby, but this is not interchangeable with the actual service they provide. As a software engineer, writing about a concept isn't the same as implementing that concept for a client.

Remember, this only applies to licensed engineers who belong to a self-regulating professional organization. Just because your job title has 'Engineer' in it, if you didn't take an oath, you aren't really an Engineer.

Actually I'm kind of glad the software industry doesn't fall into this category. I don't want a "professional organization" telling me what I can or can't charge for my work!

You're mistaken, there are people in the industry who are engineers. In some lines of work (architecture, law) membership in a professional organization is required. But if you went to school in an accredited program (most university Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, etc.), you can become a professional engineer. It's required to join the IEEE, in fact. The point of the professional organization is to hold it's members to a high standard; part of this is not offering 'bargain basement' services. The reason you don't see a lot of discount medical practitioners and lawyers is arguably because their organization would disbar them. Likewise, hiring a consulting software engineer who is a P. Eng. brings the benefit that if they act unethically, they can lose their certification.

Quite true, but I was thinking more of a founder role.