>Message: 3 >Date: 23 May 2003 08:17:02 -0700 >From: "Ted Gould" >To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us >Subject: Re: Is there anything we can do as a group about SCO ? Sorry, but as an electrical engineer who writes software, you're way off. You've basically regurgitated the same line of crap they feed engineering majors in college trying to get them to take the EIT. I fell for that crap when I was in college too, but when I got into industry I realized I just wasted my time and money taking that test. >I would have to disagree with you here. Licensing of software >developers will provide some quality in the industry. And is >rarely about government control. I would also argue that it >would probably help free software in a round about way. > >Remember, that almost all 'engineers' are licensed through the >state. And, in some states it is actually illegal to call >yourself and engineer without a license. Here is the >organization for AZ: >http://www.btr.state.az.us/ What idiotic states would these be? I've never heard of any specific ones, though I've heard this legend before. I'm an electrical engineer, and I don't have a PE, and I sure as hell don't need one to call myself an "engineer". I have a degree and I work in that profession; that's all I need. It is illegal in most states to have a company with "engineering" in the name unless there is a PE on the staff, however. Maybe this is what you were thinking of. Most such companies are small engineering consulting firms, who do things like structural engineering, where one engineer looks at your building plans and makes sure it won't collapse. This at least makes some sense from the licensing standpoint, but it's nothing like the way software is developed, or even how other engineering fields work. >To start off, I should say that I am officially an 'Engineer >in Training' and have the option to get licensed in a couple >years - so perhaps, I'm a bit bias. > >Licensing of engineers provides alot of things to the public >at large, because in reality an engineer needs to have a level >of trust with the public. You need to have faith that some >hacker didn't build the bridge your driving on or the building >your in. You want someone with certifiable credentials >certifying those projects. Most engineers don't build bridges. Professional licensing of engineers came about because of bridges actually, but that was in the early part of the century. Times and technology are different now. If a processor fails, and someone somehow dies, who are you going to blame? There were THOUSANDS of engineers working on the Pentium 4. How are you going to get Intel to figure out which particular engineer screwed up? With a project that large, it's impossible to lay blame on any one person. Also with a project that large, it's impossible to make it error-free. Any individual engineer makes all kinds of errors in their work; the organization they're a part of eliminates most of those errors because of all the checking and validation that happens. Do you think there was one head engineer for the P4 that looked over the entire design and signed off on it? Do you have any idea how complex semiconductor design and manufacturing is? No one person could possibly even have the expertise to know all the different fields involved. >But yet, the pacemaker that you get doesn't have any >requirements on the software developers. Heck, the thing >could run on WinCE and if it failed, all the people working on >it would be protected by the corporate shell. Licensed >engineers don't have this luxury. They are legally >responsible for projects they sign off on, and for protection >of the public. Ok, what are you going to do when you find the one PE that signed off on the failed pacemaker? File a class-action lawsuit? Whoopie, you've spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, just to make the guy declare bankruptcy. You're not going to get a penny out of him. That's why liability is assigned to the corporations that manufacture and promote these products. They have the financial backing, and insurance, to make it worthwhile to sue them if they screw up (and hence, with that amount of money involved, it gives you a measure of trust that they bothered to engineer the product correctly since they would obviously want to avoid a damaging lawsuit). This is also why the concept of a limited-liability corporation is a good one, and has been so successful for the past 300+ years. Instead of one guy having to worry about losing his whole life over a mistake, and never bothering to take on a large project, groups of people get together to achieve large things, and as long as they don't commit fraud, they only have to worry about losing their investment or their job if something bad happens. Of course, license or no license, anyone who does something criminally negligent can still go to jail. In my not-so-humble opinion, the entire concept of licensing engineers is absurd for most engineering fields. Almost no modern engineering project is small enough to be checked over by one engineer, and no engineers on large projects work alone. This is the reason people form companies and corporations: no one person has enough money or enough productivity to do everything himself when it comes to significant projects. Accordingly, no one person should be held responsible. Engineering isn't like the medical field, where usually only one doctor cuts you open and does surgery on you, and is responsible for doing everything right. It's also unlike the medical field in that engineers don't have malpractice insurance, and sure as hell aren't paid enough for any such thing. Companies are already scrambling to move all their engineering development to India and China because they can hire engineers there for less than $10k/year. Why are you in favor of accelerating this trend by making engineers unnecessarily more expensive? >Now, does this mean that all software production will be >illegal without a licensed software engineer? Unlikely. Just >like it is not illegal to build a bridge in your backyard >without a licensed engineer. I don't know what your insurance >company would think about it, but that's different. But what >will likely happen is that 'critical' software buyers (medial, >defense, nuclear power plants, etc.) would make a sign-off >from a licensed software engineer a requirement. Sorry, it is illegal to build a bridge in your backyard without a licensed engineer. Ever heard of building codes and building inspectors? Even if you wanted to build your own house by yourself, you have to get your design signed off by a structural engineer, and the building inspected for building code compliance. >Does this kill free software in those fields? No, not really. >It provides more of a market for companies like RedHat. >Remember that the engineer building the bridge doesn't have to >do all the work, he just has to be aware of all of it and >certify it. The same would go for RedHat hiring licensed >engineers that will certify the packages in the new 'RedHat >medical edition'. You think some engineer is going to sit there and read through the millions of lines of kernel code, or the additional millions of lines of code in the common userland programs, glibc, etc., that are present in Linux? You're kidding, right? What exactly would this achieve? This isn't a bridge, it's a software product. You can't look at it and verify that it'll work correctly. That can only be done through testing and validation. As a validation engineer I can tell you that no amount of validation will eliminate all bugs; it's basically a statistics game. You do enough validation to reach a confidence level. After that you have diminishing returns; it takes exponentially more validation effort to gain less and less additional confidence. And what about all the countless developers that wrote all that code? Aren't they supposed to be licensed too? Most of them aren't even in the US, lots of them are still in college, and none of them are going to have any interest in paying some stupid government agency thousands of dollars per year to maintain their license so they can write software for free. The Free Software movement is about empowering users and developers to have control over the software they use. It most certainly is not about creating an ivory tower where only the elite licensed software engineers are able to write code. The Free Software movement certainly didn't build up so much code so quickly by artificially limiting who they accepted code from. >Lastly, another offshoot of licensure would be keeping more >jobs in the United States. Because the licenses are managed >by the states it is nearly impossible for someone overseas to >become a licensed engineer in the states. Huh? Companies are already shipping engineering jobs overseas, and compulsory licensing would only accelerate this. Is it illegal to buy assembled circuit boards from overseas contractors? Of course not. How could they make it illegal to buy complete software packages from overseas? That's basically the way it works for many places: they contract with a company in India, which has a development staff, to produce a software product needed by the US company. How exactly do you think licensing would stop this? __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com