IEEE USA Will Fight UCITA

Knight engineer writes "IEEE-USA, the USA branch of The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers has decided to fight the UCITA. Are you ready to help?" IEEE has been against UCITA for a while, I guess they're organizing some sort of "grass roots" effort now.

Comments

Re:IEEE

[pbryan]

I am both a member of the ACM and the IEEE. I find they bring different perspectives to the practice of engineering computer-based solutions, whether solely software or a combination of software and hardware.

The IEEE has its own Computer Society, which has its own periodical publication, but I found it to be somewhat redundant when compared to the ACM. I finally ended my membership in the Computer Society.

IEEE has a number of member benefit programs that the ACM doesn't have: group insurance plans, financial programs, credit cards, regional user groups. These can be useful for independent software whor.. I mean consultants. :)

Darn! I wanted this to pass...

[human bean]

Just think what this would do for the open software and information movement.

Suppose for a minute that you are an IT director of a medium-sized business. You've probably got an admin, a couple of programmer analysts, and a couple of guys that fix PCs, and the dude who runs the server farm. You don't have the resources to fix much of anything, just keep day-to-day ops running, and maybe diddle some reports together for special purposes.

Now suppose you are going in front of your board (or owner) and you tell him that the next software upgrade you are going to purchase will lock him in, and if it doesn't work you can't do anything about it, he can't get the money back, and if he complains about it, he could get sued. What is he going to say?

How much should a little company trust a big one? A basic rule in business is that you should try to do business with companies your own size. This give you some leverage when the inevitable problems show up. Does the business owner want to do business with big software company? Or maybe he starts looking for other ways out? As IT manager you know you can't write your own, way too expensive, but maybe you could find someone to do it for you. Or maybe you could switch vendors. If you do switch vendors, are you going to pick one that has the same grief as the one you left? or maybe you want to buy something with an open license, that you can get fixed anywhere, or maybe (if you absolutely have to) fix yourself?

I see this as an opportunity to snatch some of the vertical market money away from the entrenched closed software folks, and get some real apps based on open software. That would ensure its existence far better than any foundations or grants, let me tell you.