More likely a license, granted by some developer's guild (or worse, a government body) that allows you legal access to SWE tools and the ability to be a paid developer. Lose your license and the few proprietary tools around can reject your code signature or the guild can sue you. This sounds like fiction when RMS proposed this dystopia in the 90s but consider a future where complexity is so large only a handful of tools exist that can manipulate said complexity, or medical programming where access to 'bio IDEs' is licensed like dentists/nurses are because of insurance requirements.
