...it seems just hollow words. There's a lot of [professional bodies], when you start looking, and that's the issue.
One of the characteristics of a profession is that there is some professional body that has some sanction over the practitioners. I don't see anything yet equivalent in the IT space. Perhaps it's something we do need to help improve the reputation of the IT industry.
So, how about an existing body, like the British Computer Society (BCS), taking on more powers? Or would it need to be a completely new body?
I guess there are bodies like the BCS, Chartered IT Professional and other standards that are around. It would be sensible to build on things that are already there, rather than start again, otherwise it would take even longer to get something into place. It's quite a hard challenge for what's a pretty junior industry really. We're still learning as we go.
What's your perspective? Should [one professional IT body] be something that companies like Microsoft and others be more active in lobbying for?
ZDNet.co.uk can ask the readers. Is lack of accountability a particular problem for the public sector or is it an issue for the private sector as well?
I think it's right across the board to be honest. I think the public-sector [failures] tend to get a lot of visibility because they tend to be very ambitious projects, the bigger ones. When something goes wrong, it's a more dramatic problem than some of the smaller projects that go on in the private sector.
One of the characteristics of a profession is that there is some professional body that has some sanction over the practitioners. I don't see anything yet equivalent in the IT space
Jerry Fishenden, Microsoft UK
You're familiar with all the problems the private sector has — all those leaks in the States — over 40 million credit-card details being compromised and all that sort of stuff.
Are you talking about TJX, the parent company of TK Maxx?
Yes. There have been quite a lot of reports on the internet recently, partly because there is now disclosure in the States and there wasn't in the past.
Do you think disclosure here in the UK would be beneficial?
Strictly speaking, legally it should happen anyway because, if someone is in breach of the Data Protection Act, they're meant to report it and be accountable for it.
Yes, but it is a complex and tangled area of law, isn't it? The Information Commissioner enforces the Data Protection Act and reports to government, so the information of a breach could get out like that; there's the Freedom of Information Act for public-sector bodies but, with a data-breach law, it actually plainly states that, if you have a data breach, you have to disclose it.
It can only be a good thing overall because it would encourage people to treat IT more seriously than some people seem to. I'm just amazed [at] the number of people that seem to have what I would call fairly basic problems — data that's up on the site that isn't even given any basic form of protection, which is rather bizarre. Not mentioning any particular recent episodes, of course.
Well, the head of the British Medical Association (BMA) resigned over the junior doctors database problems.
Yes. I suppose the question is: if that's a professional thing to do, where's the IT industry in this discussion? Yes, the head of the BMA resigned, but was it or was it not also an IT problem? Something seems to have been put up on the web that was completely unprotected. How can anyone be naive enough to think, in this age of incredibly sophisticated search engines crawling over sites, that anything up on a website is not in the public domain? You do wonder what level of naivety goes on, and who takes responsibility for sign-off for some of what happens in IT.
I'm not sure if anybody in the IT profession is being held accountable after these public events.
It's that communication problem again — technology people and business people not always communicating that well. You don't know at what level some of those decisions get taken.
Talkback
This attack of fear, uncertainty and doubt over IP issues is a sad state of affairs for Microsoft. It is an admission that they cannot keep up with pace and innovation of open source development, their creaking legacy codebase is too spaghetti infested for even their massive resources to handle effectively. Six years between versions of Windows, and for what ? The big new security feature, i.e. enter the admin password was present in Unix some 30 years ago, how about respecting that IP ?
Microsoft now have no option but to employ lawyers with bully boy tactics to coerce businesses to buy their products or those of a subservient partner (Novell). The dinosaur is in trouble, the small hairy mammals of the open source world are more nimble and continue to eat into their market space - eg the Dell / Ubuntu announcement. The Linux distros deliver new functionality on a 6 monthly cycle - not 6 YEARS. It is a vibrant software ecosystem that is evolving rapidly.
This admission of sluggishness is a sad admission indeed, given that MS have made much use of open source in their own products in the past (for example the BSD TCP/IP stack). Its morally and technically repugnant.
Forget legalistic games, try to get back to innovation.
IT manager 07
Quoting:
"It depends where you come from on intellectual property really. As someone who is also a writer, I'm always quite intrigued by the idea that, if I write something, I shouldn't have some sort of rights over what I've produced, and that other people can go off and make money off the back of my creative work. I'm not entirely sure what people are asking — that Microsoft shouldn't protect its intellectual property?"
Isn't that precisely the point. When writing one touches on many ideas, but wouldn't consider patenting those ideas. When we write our work is protected by copyright law. Can you imagine what would have happened if the great philosophers, scientists, musicians, artists and writers had patented their ideas so that nobody else could use them without paying. We today wouldn't be able to have a conversation without violating somebodies intellectual property. The arguement of the free software community is that software should be treated in the same manner, copyrightable but not patentable. I for one believe this to be a much more realistic approach.
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Will M$ open their code to scrutiny? Probably not. Do they have code that infringes on others IP? More than likely. Their GUI came
from Xerox and Apple. In fact, if it wasn't for some else's ideas
their would be no M$. Everything they started with belonged to
somone else. They either copied it or purchased it. If they claim
Open Source infringes then let it be shown in court, or shut up.
They are running with their tails between their legs because they
are scared of Open Source and all other competition.