Before you think of being a do-gooder...

[Evan Leibovitch]

Walter Dnes wrote:
> 1) Unlike bricklaying, or carpentry, or metalworking, etc, there isn't
> a century or two of publications and knowledge handed down from
> generation to generation.
So what? There are old professions and new ones. Even air-conditioning
technicians get licensed.

> C and Java are two of the "oldest" languages currently in major use for new development.
Again... so what? "C or Java" is like "Phillips or Robertson" -- simply
a matter of what tools the practitioner chooses. Most trade licensing
has nothing to do with the choice of tools so much as the ethics with
which those tools are applied.

> 2) Be careful what you wish for.  A "profession" means that only "certified professionals" can practise it, e.g. medicine.
Sure, but one need not go from one extreme to the other. A license
scheme, such as used by most trades, keeps barriers to entry low while
still allowing the public a way to eliminate the clearly unethical or
otherwise incapable.

> Now imagine back in 1992, that it was illegal for a university student and a bunch of snotty-nosed kids to collaborate over the net to write a new OS.
Ah, but they didn't do so for money under contract.

The lack of a license doesn't prevent you from working on your own car
or your friends, but it might prevent you from charging someone else
money to do it.

> And even licenced programmers who attempted to do so would've faced discipline for "programming malpractice", because they dared to use a macro-kernel, when "everybody knows" that a micro kernel is the holy grail.
>   
Malpractise applies if you promise a solution that doesn't work, causing
the client damage.

If you contract to provide a solution and then charge the client so that
you could experiment on a method that didn't work -- without alerting
the client what you were doing and when existing methods were known to
work -- an accusation of malpractise might indeed be reasonable.

There is a fairly easy-to-define boundary in most fields between R&D and
commercial practise. I would agree with the assertion that the current
IT industry's difficulty of separarating the two, to the detriment of
the public, is a problem.

- Evan

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