NEMUG Newsletter
November, 2004, Articles
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The Law for Programmers, eye opening education!
Sometimes the law seems to outsiders to be a double negative of a double negative and the law for intellectual property rights is embedded deep in contract law. Dan Batterman presented important aspects of that area, untwisting the threads of critical logic and explicating the valid points for the various interests.
For example, the simple idea of a contract is made up of three elements, the offer, acceptance and the consideration. Verbal contracts are legal, but it is important to understand the risks. Marriages are great at the beginning. It is important to hammer out the contract and be very clear at the beginning of the business relationship while all are in agreement. It is much easier than after a disagreement arises. Dan understood the logic of people who choose not to enter into a contract and the pitfalls of this logic. "Lawyers are @%$#&%$ expensive," "the law is too complicated" "things are going great!"
So why is a written contract a good idea. Completing IT and system development projects on time and under budget is rare. The range of success in that category is 9% to 16%. Close to 80% of the time in projects is spent fixing problems or bugs. The point of a contract is to allocate the risk, so no one party takes the whole fall if things don,t work out perfectly.
Dan went through aspects of contracts and clearly defined some complex terms. Two words that now have meaning for me are assignment and waiver. Assignment refers to the party who entered the agreement. Most people don't want the assignment to change. A waiver sounds like a double negative. If a client gives a developer oral notice of some change, the developer wants to make sure that by accepting an oral change, he or she hasn't waived the right to a written notice in the future. You don't want an erosion of the clauses in the agreement because of one exception.
In the end my head was swimming with terms, but the good news is Dan had given us a handout with the points and definitions. He is also easily accessible by email or phone. I highly recommend his valuable presentation to programmer and IT user groups.
~ submitted by Heidi Pape Laird
From The Chair
Please join us at our upcoming meetings:
- November 9, 2004: Extreme sports? Why not extremeprogramming? Damon Carr will give his perspective on XP/Agile methods.How does it relate to M or Caché technology? Come to theWellesley Gateway building on the Northwest corner of the intersectionof Routes 9 and 128 (95) and find out what it is.
- January 11, 2005: John Halamka of CareGroup at Beth Israel Deaconess tospeak about "PatientSite" and other topics.
- March 9, 2005, DEVCON 2005 (Feb 27-March 2) recap of the IntersystemsDeveloper's Conference
- April 9, 2005, A once in 27 1/2 year celebration!!! Big day forMUMPSTERS: $h turns from 59999 to 60000 at midnight on Saturday, April9, 2005. We will mark it with a celebration and reunion of some of theoriginal writers and users of M and some of us more recent arrivals.Come see what the 40 years have done to a crazy idea by a bunch ofcrazy pioneers.
- May 11, 2005, Member programming problems, discussions, tricks andpractices presented by Ray Wright, Sales Engineer at Intersystems.
- July 2005, TBD
Thanks to Marilyn Paterno, departing Chair of NEMUG for herdedication and work over the years.
Thanks also to retiring board member Joe Crisafulli who willcontinue to assist us with the newsletters.
Thanks to Susan Gitelle Baron who has been the editor of thenewsletter for 8 years and retired this year.
Heidi Pape Laird, Chair