1.3. What its impact is

If this legislation is approved, software and hardware calendaring and scheduling products based on the iCalendar standard will need to be changed. Users of such products—​universities, companies of all sizes, and many other types of organizations—​as well as their suppliers will face a major challenge:

• How can vendors efficiently issue “patches” to the problem in so short a time? Additionally, how could their customers—​with millions of end users—​deploy those fixes in so short a time?

• As a corollary, how can organizations in the U.S. that depend on such products make the necessary changes and remain synchronized with colleagues outside of the US?

To complicate matters, this generally affects any calendaring and scheduling product whether or not it’s based on the iCalendar standard. Anything that keeps a calendar, including cell phones, is potentially affected. Many embedded environmental systems such as building management systems, time-lock control, work-shift and time clocks, may also be affected.

It is also not clear whether other countries that currently share the same timezone and DST definitions as the US will adopt the new definitions at the same time, or stay with the current ones. This has serious impact for cross-border commerce as for two months in the year, regions of the US will have a local time one hour different than similar regions in other countries.