[long] Re: Legal traps in open source

[Michael Still]

On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Alex Satrapa wrote:

> Similarly in the computing industry, you have the unskilled/semi-skilled
> workers - the Visual Basic programmers, the MCSE "sysadmins" and the
> C/C++ code monkeys.
>
> You have the skilled workers - the Makefile editors, the Unix sysadmins,
> the Java developers and Perl scripters.  These guys actually have to
> know what they're doing.
>
> Then you have the Engineer - that's the guy with the degree, who also
> has the professional indemnity insurance (even though every contract
> says, "I'm not liable").  You only need the one.

I think you have the skill triangle upside down. Are you really trying to
argue that Tridge / Rusty / Paulus / whoever is "less skilled" than people
who write Makefiles, and perl scripts?

I suspect the skill level requirement is more based on the criticality of
the system. No one really cares if my website goes down, so that is
"unskilled". If my website was a webby control front end to a nuclear
reactor, then I would expect the developer to be "skilled". I would also
expect to be able to sue them when things went wrong, and for them to be
professionally certified in some way so I know what I am shopping for...

Mikal

-- 

Michael Still (mikal at stillhq.com)     UTC +10 hours