BlackOut2003 - "More sutainted Software/IT needed?"

[Robert Michel]

Salve Niall,

"Years ago, engineers set the pace - today every investment must be 
profitable" Mr. Eberhad Meller, chief of the association of German
Electrical economics (Chef des Verbandes der Elektrizitätswirtschaft)
Source: "Die Zeit" 21.8.2003 #35 page 7

> Firstly, the power situation in the US is woeful - the infrastructure
..
> Secondly, the European power infrastructure is far more tightly
...
> Thirdly, I think it would be a grave mistake to think that how the US
> power companies manage their IT projects is somehow representative of
> everything else. The reason IT projects fail are (in this order) (i)
> lack of experience in managing, planning and deploying IT solutions
> (ii) high churn rate of experienced staff (iii) a lack of
> professionalism by a minority of IT professionals. Because companies
> rarely have peer review or other (costly) proper quality review
> schemes, one or two poor programmers can inflict masses of damage to
> a project. Because of the historic shortage of workers, most
> companies tolerated any poor programmer rather than fire them.
>
> All these things will improve naturally as software engineering
> matures. Until then, usually he who pays more gets a better product,
> and until management understand this they can continue to expect
> problems.

Realy? M$ Windows 2000 licence cost more that a Debian distribution.
There are more example that paying more means not getting a better product.
The money must be invested inteligient.
Economic people doesn`t care about long time periode.
And the big question is *What is a better product*?
The US-"cyber security standard" will be made to go on with the same 
philosophy and products - and I feare this will not support free software!
FSF must raise its voice.

I would like to get a personal mail of a German reading FSF person.

Greetings
rob