Uniform Commercial Code, MS, and competition

[Cem Kaner <kaner@kaner.com>]

  I'll be one of the speakers at the appraising microsoft conference, late
  Friday.
  
  I'm not a Microsoft hater, but I am deeply concerned about licensing
  practices in the industry and ways in which the laws governing them are
  about to change. From a competition viewpoint, these changes will protect
  existing large publishers, at the expense of newcomers. There are many
  other problems involving customer dissatisfaction that this extension to
  the Uniform Commercial Code will cause.
  
  Microsoft has been very active in drafting these laws, along with the main
  publishers' associations. But so have Apple, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Adobe, and
  Intel.
  
  My site on software customer dissatisfaction is www.badsoftware.com.
  
  The Appraising Microsoft paper is at www.badsoftware/nader.htm.
  
  A paper summarizing data on software customer dissatisfaction is at
  www.badsoftware.com/stats.htm.
  
  A section-by-section analysis of anti-customer effects of the Uniform
  Commercial Code changes is at www.badsoftware.com/ali.htm.
  
  An attempt at a thoughtful look at societal risk management strategies
  involving liability for bad products is at www.badsoftware.com/theories.htm.
  
  I'll be in Washington tomorrow a.m. through the end of the conference and
  will be glad to discuss the UCC revisions or the Uniform Electronic
  Transactions Act (electronic commerce, with some significant consumer
  protection issues) with you there.
  
  -- Cem Kaner
  _______________________________________________________________________
  Cem Kaner, J.D., Ph.D.				       Attorney at Law 
  P.O. Box 1200           Santa Clara, CA 95052             408-244-7000
  Author (with Falk &  Nguyen) of TESTING COMPUTER SOFTWARE (2nd Ed, VNR)
  
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