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