“State legislators who enact the Uniform Computer Information
Transaction Act (UCITA) in the belief that it will bring high-tech
jobs to their constituents may be in for a big disappointment. The
results may be just the opposite.”
“The premise the software industry lobby has been using to
encourage Virginia and Maryland to enact UCITA quickly is that the
law’s endorsement of shrinkwrap/clickwrap license terms will have
high-tech firms flocking to relocate their operations there. On the
surface, one might think that would be true, considering how
eagerly the Microsofts and AOLs are backing it, but there are a
number of reasons why UCITA is unlikely to bring any benefit to
states that adopt it early.”
“UCITA may well wind up encouraging some of the high-tech
talent that an early-adopting state already has to leave. Why?
High-tech professionals themselves dislike it intensely. The
two most prestigious organizations representing the
engineering/programmer community — the IEEE and Association of
Computing Machinery (ACM) — are opposed to UCITA. Many other
organizations representing software industry professionals have
also spoken out against UCITA, including the Software Engineering
Institute, the American Society for Quality, and the Free Software
Foundation. That such groups oppose UCITA is a fact that has always
been ignored by those who drafted the law, and so far it sounds as
if it’s also being ignored by the state legislatures that have
UCITA on a fast track.”