Some of these require certifications to be applied (employed?) - Medicine, Law, ..., and some of these require hardware (and legal stuff for buying components?) - chemistry, ...

Software is unique enough in that it doesn't require any certifications to be gainfully employed, generally you don't run afoul of laws and the hardware is very cheap compared to other stuff (a woodworking shop will quickly cost you 10k, while a decent computer is <1k).

Computer science/software development is relatively open to people without degrees, especially if they have a public presence. And, as you say, for software in particular, there isn't much special equipment required (EE can get harder).

The thing with disciplines like math and physics is that even if you master a BS curriculum in a few years, what now? It's probably hard enough to get a directly-related job with just a top-notch undergrad degree. And as you suggest, self-studying law might get you a job as a paralegal.

> relatively open to people without degrees

The best programmer on the last team I worked on didn't have a high-school diploma, the second best was a waiter. I'm not sure how much more open you can get.

The fact that talented people without degrees can get jobs to an extent that can be essentially impossible in other fields doesn't mean that they can trivially get hired for the many many positions that advertise various degree requirements.

It's also possible that this has actually helped us. Software builds on software, and this increases the productivity of software engineers, and makes whole new applications possible.

What isn't free is the time it takes to learn all these.

> In a way, only we in IT/CS are "dumb" enough to give away education for nearly free.

This is not true, at all.

You can basically get a free education in math,physics, chemistry and engineering (among others) if you know where to find the info:

1: Edx,MIT OpenCourseWare, Coursera, etc

2. Individual course pages by University

3. Asking in say Twitter or Reddit, about the best online available course for the topic you are interested in

4. If you are not a strong believer on copyright issues, certain online libraries named after biblical books can help too.

Let's take a non-CS scientific topic kinda randomly(first on my mind): Chemical Kinetics and Reactor Design aka Chemical Reaction Engineering.

After a little bit of searching, you can come up with:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/chemical-engineering/10-37-chemi... (MIT)

http://umich.edu/~elements/5e/344/notes2013.html (U Mich)

http://umich.edu/~elements/5e/lectures/umich.html (Prof Fogler is author of one of the most well known textbooks on this subject)

Want to try another countries?

Finland : https://mycourses.aalto.fi/course/view.php?id=20481&section=...

India: https://cosmolearning.org/courses/chemical-reaction-engineer...

I could repeat the same with almost any other science or engineering main fields of study.

There's a lot for chemistry. Plenty from MIT even. It's just a little harder to learn on your own (especially when just starting out) because most people really do need to do the physical experiments.

There are forums full of autodidacts messing around with chemistry just like the forums full of autodidacts messing around with programming/CS.