> If I leave my current job, I will no longer have access
> to the code I've written there.
# "Software is like waffles: you have to throw the first one out"
> My labor has been alienated.
If "your code" is like "most code" you'll be happy to leave it behind. Hopefully writing it has made you a better programmer. I wonder why the house painter doesn't feel such attachment to the paint she leaves behind at her previous job; or the lawyer to the contract written late at night; and of course the manufacturing worker seems to not have access to that which was manufactored.
Software is mostly a way to get a job done; rarely is it valuable in and of itself. In the few cases we can think of, it usually can be shown that it was not the lone software developer working on "his code" that created the value -- it happens, but it's as rare as Michael Jordan "winning the Championship" ...
> Working on free software, programmers always have access to
> the results of their labor, as does everyone else.
The world is littered with mediocre, unfinisheds, buggy code; you can't hardly swing a dead laptop without running into some. The world would be better off with less code available. And if you think you've written something really clever, not having access to it should cause you to think harder the next time you have to solve a similar problem.
Hopefully you'll do a better job the next time.
/jordan