LocalFOSS

Excuse my naivety, I haven't actually been 'professional' for very long and don't understand how the industry views the ACS.

I think Mandatory Registration is unnecessary - we aren't dealing with peoples lives and we aren't building things that can fall down and kill people. It would seem to provide a barrier to entry that goes against the community notion of FOSS and I see especial harm to students. I supported myself through uni / college by taking on contract tech jobs - with Mandatory Registration would bright young students be relegated to working long hours in menial jobs such as waiting to support themselves?

However an enforceable Code of Ethics seems like a very good idea - for anyone who wants to call themselves a professional. Optional sign up to such a scheme would surely provide greater standing and client confidence. For this reason I was planning on joining ACS when I return to the country and properly start my 'professional' career in Australia. Am I mistaken in that view?

-- Novensiles divi Flamen --
---- Miles Militis Fons ----

Registration and licensing of IT-workers seems sensible if they're involved with high-security information etcetera, simply because of the possibility of other forms of enforceable-licensing possibly overlooking workers handling and controlling large amounts of private and personal (valuable) information.  At very-least, there should be some form of character-vouchsaving requirement. The rest of us have to be licensed and insured to the limit, so why not IT-workers in potentially powerful and remunerative positions, should their bent divert them from the true path?

An enforceable code of ethics is a much-larger can of worms that is not confined to the IT worker-space, but is now encompassing the entire Internet, particularly in this age of easily-accessible blog-sites. The last time I tried to access this site, I was met with some offensive pornographic descriptors in listing-format, ostensibly from some guy in Russia. Last-night, I found the same thing contaminating Wunderground's blogs, and numerous blogs railing against it, but it caused me to stop and think, remembering this topic on James and Karin's site. We definitely need the tools to control or enforce a code-of-ethics, but where are they, and how effective could they be? Here are a few jottings skimming the more obvious potential problems of protecting or enforcing a code of ethics across the IT-space.

We don't need enforcement of ethics within the physical work-place, as laws covering that situation are already plentiful and promiscuous. However, the actual IT-workspace - the Internet - is a different can-of-worms. 

It is an unfortunate fact of life that segments of society perceive the need to overload directories, files, servers and sites, and more-recently - blog-space - with inappropriate or downright offensive comment and content, and it is equally the fact that this sort of thing is an insidious and invidious-attack against the well-meaning owner or delivery-service, because it is the touch of a button that enables the vandal to re-instigate an attack against the site's resources, yet response requires considerable time and effort on the part of the provider, in-order to simply-remove a single-instance of such offensive or libelous content, which the mongrel-attacker can simply reinsert via a single mouse-click, as often as they want to. Preventing or blocking an attacker's address is not really an option (unless one can hire a full-time operator to constantly monitor and repel > block the initial-attacker, its friend's addresses, its acquired, seized, and other public-address sites (e.g. Internet-cafe, kiosk, etcetera), its employers addresses, even poor unsuspecting-victims who have nothing to do with the attacks, falsified-addresses, or even trusted but unauthorized physical use of bona-fide good-citizen's hardware and addresses! For the vandal intent on mayhem and misconduct, do-right upright citizens provide a wealth of resources and play-toys to utilize in commission of their attack strategies. Mongrel is a nicely-descriptive word, but vandal is more true!

Barry