> To me certification and a code of ethics are some what different topics. > If one wishes to be a professional then subscribing to a code of ethics is > mandatory. Certainly as part of the code of ethics one should be required to > have the appropriate certification to provide assurance they have the > necessary technical knowledge.
I agree here, in part. As far as a code of ethics being "worthless" unless there's an ability to enforce, I find that idea to be lightly fascist. A code itself, however, I don't find "laughable" at all. Nor do I think it religion. The idea proposed was a code of ethics, not the "Holy Word of the Everlasting God of BSD". I would hope that the difference would be plain to anyone past the age of needing to rebel against the establishment, man. As with the idea about social hierarchy and the associate certification, I think there's a larger point here. Who says that ethical issues are non-technical? So, the assertion here would be that ethics should *not* be included on a certification test because there is no way that ethical decisions ever involve technical knowledge? If that is the assertion, then I would have to disagree with that, and if you do disagree, then the consideration of including ethics questions on a certification becomes valid. The question for me would be more, "What form do the questions take?" I do think that since different professional associations may have different ethical takes on relevant issues, depending on the function of the organization, it would be probably incorrect to test against a specific ethical code (unless there's a long-standing and justifiable BSD community tradition). And if that's the case, then the questions would more likely take the form of a given scenario and a number of technical problems associated with it. For example, you belong to organization X (or department X, or team X, whatever) which prohibits some behavior. Given that team Y needs certain access which could lead to a violation of that ethical/business rule, how do you structure your filesystem, user rights, etc., to enforce the rule? For an OS which has the notion of "permissions", and that those permissions are commonly used in both technical and policy issues -- and the the idea of "permission" is pretty central to the whole notion of ethics anyway -- I don't think that tossing the idea of ethical considerations in testing is necessarily a default. _______________________________________________ BSDCert mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert
