Free Wisdom Online: Professional Regulation in Brazil

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Brazilian government has gotten a lot of praise from geeks in US for
their stance on open source, which they really do support.  But not
everything is not quite so rosy.  According to to a talk by [Roberto
Bigonha](http://www2.dcc.ufmg.br/~bigonha/) that I heard at SBC last
week, as many as seven draft laws are currently making their way
through Brazilian Congress, all aiming to prohibit people without
undergraduate degree in software engineering from working as software
engineers and to give control over the profession to a "professional
council" of informatics.  Note that getting an master's degree
wouldn't be enough: only an undergraduate degree.  So, people like
myself (with an M.S. in CS but an undergraduate degree in a different
area) would be out of luck.  Not to mention people like Steve Jobs or
Bill Gates.  (Ok, one might argue that one of those two shouldn't have
been allowed to code, but you get my point.)

What's worse, according to a recent study, the self-educated make up
*half* of Brazil's open source developers, so professional regulation
wouldn't exactly be a pro-open-source move.  I don't want to say that
self-educated developers wouldn't benefit from formal education, but
banning them from work or letting a council decide who should work and
who shouldn't is counter-productive.  Note that the measure will quite
obviously fail to solve the main problem that it aims to address -
that of software quality and security.  As Prof. Bigonha points out,
most of the countries that Brazil routinely imports software from do
not require certification.  Thus, making sure that Brazilian
developers get their BS before touching any code, isn't going to
protect Brazil from the next Windows worm.  (Of course, Windows worms
aren't caused by lack of formal education anyway - crappy software is
more often a result of management priorities.)

If all of this sounds too far fetched, a crazy idea of some nutty
deputies that would never turn into an actual law, consider that many
professions in Brazil are already regulated in exactly this manner.
For example, one cannot work as a journalist in Brazil without a BA in
Journalism.  (One wonders where this leaves bloggers...)  As I
understand, major newspapers do sometimes find ways to hire people
without journalism degrees by crafting their job descriptions
carefully, but I've heard stories about the association of economists
trying to prevent a statistician from "illegally practicing"
economics.  Or maybe it was the other way around - it's a blog post,
so I don't need to check my sources. :) Additionally, two professional
councils have already tried claiming the authority over regulating
software development.  One is the Council of Administration who is
regulating employment of "administrators" (and making sure that nobody
administrates without a degree, I guess).  Another one is the Council of
Engineering and Architecture.  Both have laid claims to software in
the past, but haven't managed to enforce them so far.  As I
understand, of the seven laws, some propose giving informatics to one
of those councils, others suggest creating a new one.

So, not everything is so rosy in the land of "software livre."  In
fact, government's support for open source itself is a more
complicated issue that it appeared to me from California, but that's a
topic for another post.

Prof. Bigonha has [a
page](http://www2.dcc.ufmg.br/~bigonha/Sbc/plsbc.html) discussing the
issue of professional regulation (unfortunately only in Portuguese).
To summarize the site, Brazilian Computation Society (SBC) has written
it's own draft law that establishes that software industry should be
self-regulated and that anyone should be able to work as a developer
regardless of type of education.  They are now trying to get the
Congress to pass this law instead of the seven that would impose
regulation.

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