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.

IEEE

[Alik]

This makes me very happy. Out of curiousity, though, what proportion of coders are members of IEEE? I have my degree in CS, but always figured that the "right" professional organization for me was the ACM; the IEEE seemed like it was aimed more towards the hardware guys. They certainly never tried to recruit anyone from my department, whereas we occasionally got promotional bits from the ACM.

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. :)

Re:IEEE

[Zordak]

I'm a EE student, with an emphasis in Computer Engineering and a member of the student chapter of IEEE. My responsibilities at work are almost exclusively writing software (well, LOTS of documents, too, but that's another story). Many of the full engineers here (i.e. with degrees already) also spend most of their time writing software. Of course, a lot of our software has to do with testing/driving/modeling hardware, but you'd probably be surprised at how much code EE's produce.

Do not teach Confucius to write Characters

Re:IEEE

[Zan Thrax]

I had to join the IEEE to be involved in a project at DeVry. (we we're supposed to be working on fuzzy logic based ai. I thought it was waaaaay beyond us from the start, but what the hell, it was more interesting than class, even if the other first year guys couldn't follow my algorithm designs.) I got one copy of the CS publication before I moved, and I didn't bother sending them a change of address. The journal seemed _very_ hardware oriented, I simply didn't understand much of it all.

ACM?

[Black Parrot]

> always figured that the "right" professional organization for me was the ACM

Speaking of which... could someone outline what the ACM is all about, i.e., who should join, and why?

Thanx.

--

Who actually supports this?

[luckykaa]

Is there anyone in favour of UCITA? Surely the risks are greater than the gains for most software companies. They use software as well after all.

Re:Who actually supports this?

[Zan Thrax]

The people who pushed it through support it. That's about it though.

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.

Re:ACM?

[MarkusH]

Speaking of which... could someone outline what the ACM is all about, i.e., who should join, and why?

You could always look here [acm.org]

To quote from their web page: ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is an international scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences, and applications of information technology. With a world-wide membership of 80,000, ACM functions as a locus for computing professionals and students working in the various fields of Information Technology.

Re:Darn! I wanted this to pass...

[ChristTrekker]

You're not serious, are you? That's an incredibly idealistic scenario. Sure, I'd like it too, but really...the big guys are just going to use UCITA to squash everyone else.

Re:Darn! I wanted this to pass...

[human bean]

Some time ago all software was licensed much the same as this bill would allow, except that it was done under the terms "trade secret agreements". These were done with big corporations (there were only three at the time, and really only One...) and they insisted that you sign up for a serious chunk of change and your first-born to be able to use their products, and they wanted organ-donor status for you to be allowed to actually write your own programs.

A number of companies didn't like this, and took it upon themselves to fix it for a buck or two. One dude slapped some wires in a box and started hustling S-100 cards. Another took a freely published academic programming software (open source...) and turned it into a billion dollar industry. This was all heavily frowned upon by the "extremely evil corporate coven of One".

These three companies tried to lock things down. Big deal. We built others. They set up restrictions. We simply went around them. If the current crop of on-tops (remember the guy with the BASIC?) trys to work things the same way as his ancestors, we will deal with it as we always have. By using ingenuity to come up with a better (or at least different and unlicensed) way.

Not only that, but I can make a buck in the process. Never underestimate the ability of a businessman to get out of paying a dollar. And never get between a businessman and a dollar. If he's got a choice between a hundred-thousand and seventy-five, all things being equal, he picks the seventy-five. I intend to be standing there to collect.

Could it be the..

[L+st]

..15th post?