October 7th, 2005
Is your open source project ready for the daylight savings time fix?
Here's a computer problem you can blame George W. Bush for personally.
Starting in 2007 daylight savings time will start a month earlier and end a few days later. Instead of starting on April 2, as it will next year, it will start on March 11. The idea is to save energy. It was part of a bill passed earlier this year and signed into law by the President. (Thus, the blame game…it was really a way to get you into the story, so apologies to both you and the President.)
This is not a big deal for most PC users, but if you've got a large scaled system it is a very big deal. When transactions actually post is a big deal. When alarms go off is a very big deal.
Microsoft has promised patches and I expect other proprietary vendors will get this done. It will be a hassle for system administrators, who will have to make sure the patches get tested and installed, but it's not as bad as Y2K.
My question is, of course, whether the open source community is ready for this?
There are many open source operations that need to know the time in order to work properly. As open source moves into the enterprise, this number increases. And these projects must have patches in place, or their time-dependent applications won't work properly.
Are you ready to fix Daylight Savings Time?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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