Continuing my chain of blogs about the law...

re: Continuing my chain of blogs about the law...

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re: Continuing my chain of blogs about the law...

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re: Continuing my chain of blogs about the law...

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re: Continuing my chain of blogs about the law...

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re: Continuing my chain of blogs about the law...

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OSBC and What It’s All About

Port 25 — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:35:00 GMT

OSBC made me think. There were some simple highlights (like introducing myself and being recognzied as “a Port 25 blogger”…my 1.5 minutes of fame). And certainly a lowlight was the concern many people expressed around whether Microsoft’s open source strategy

re: Continuing my chain of blogs about the law...

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 01:19:59 GMT

Thanks...to everyone who commented on this whole chain of threads. I don't know if this experience qualifies as "web 2.0" or not--I'll have to ask Hank <g>--but it started from something I read and evolved in ways I didn't expect in part due to comments back-and-forth. It sill is, which is cool.

Software development and law have a lot in common

einhverfr — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:05:56 GMT

Both are, for the most part, linguistic disciplines. Both use languages which are more prescriptive than standard natural language (programming languages are fully prescriptive while legalese may be only partly). For this reason, I tend to think that good lawyers and good software developers are likely to think alike.

Another thing that occurs to me is that conservative software development principles (often used in the development of Linux and some of the projects I am involved in) have a lot in common with the idea that the stability of the law is a common good.

In short, I think we open source software developers could learn a thing or two from good lawyers. I don't know whether the converse hold true however.

re: Continuing my chain of blogs about the law...

CDarklock — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:18:46 GMT

I think you've hit on something here.

The open source community *is* very much like legal pro bono work. Some few people who have made their fortunes already, or stand little chance of making a fortune at all, work in it full time. Mostly, it's dedicated professionals who care about their craft, dedicating a few hours here and a few hours there. Some few of them on the other end of the spectrum have no time or patience for this, and don't do it at all.

But the reason we encourage lawyers to do pro bono work is twofold. It is, inarguably, a benefit to the community and those with no ability to pay. But it is also a benefit to the lawyer - it reminds him that what he does has purpose and meaning beyond the paycheck. It recognises that our legal system frequently requires an attorney to ignore his personal convictions and moral compass to guarantee the foundation of our legal system: if a lawyer refuses to defend a man accused of child abuse, for example, that man's ability to receive a fair trial may be irreparably damaged.

The technology world also requires a developer to ignore his personal convictions and moral compass on occasion. He may come in one morning and face a demand for a new report structure that must be up and running by two PM. The five hours available to design and build that report are not enough to do it properly, so he does a terrible hack job that barely works. He will probably never touch this report again, but it may be run for years. If he cares at all whether he does a good job, this is detrimental to his health and well-being.

Effectively, both the lawyer and the developer are occasionally required to be BAD community citizens. The misperception of the public is that they do this for the money, but the fact is they do it because it is part and parcel of the system which enables them to be good community citizens. They can't be good citizens unless they're occasionally bad ones.

There is a fantasy in the world that you can be a good citizen all the time, without ever being a bad one. It's this whole black-or-white idea that either you are good 100% of the time, or you are bad; and that if you are bad, you are necessarily bad 100% of the time. Lawyers have long ago made peace with this (nobody knows more lawyer jokes than a lawyer). So, too, have politicians. Developers, being a reasonably new profession, have yet to make their peace with the trade-offs of the industry... so we have a false war between the open source and proprietary software worlds, because it's not always clear to either side how to survive in the same world with the other.

But lawyers and politicians have figured out how to both do their good and accept the necessary trade-offs. Developers will learn this, too.

re: Continuing my chain of blogs about the law...

davidmeyer — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:17:04 GMT

Hi Bryan,

I think this is an interesting subject, because you get people on two fronts here. At a former employer, we had two dedicated, highly paid developers working on a popular open source project...at our expense. We had an interest in its success.

There were two groups that voiced their opinion about this:

Group A - How cool. Full-time developers on Open Source community projects!

Group B - Proprietary software manufacturers have NO business in our space.

Guess who was right. BOTH were.

With Group B, that employer had an a group dedicated to Linux and Open Source, but they were not really backed by management. Because of that, they had limited support for what they wanted to do. Thus, the developers were eventually pulled out of what they were doing because management cut off funding.

Group A was right because what we did was provide two developers that would have been otherwise working on projects that we needed for our products that only we and our paying customers benefitted from. Instead, the community wrapped around this project and the users of this very popular project benefitted from their hard work and our finances. To this day the features our guys built into the package are still very popular.

It was a good thing to be sure, and I only regret the management of this past company pulling the plug on the Open Source team.

What happened to that company? After 30 years in business, they are in serious trouble. Pressure from Open Source companies has taken business away, and because this company no longer works with Open Source, customers are going elsewhere to companies that do.

The Open Source lab at Microsoft is a great thing because Microsoft clearly sees the benefit to Open Source in some respects, although I don't expect to see Longhorn Open Sourced (wouldn't it be cool if it were though) and they are putting their money where their mouth is through the Open Source lab and the SUSE Linux partnership formed with Novell. I predict that there will be a measureable result attained by the Open Source group at MS and in the end, we'll see a peaceful, productive and divserse development enviornment at Microsoft where paid developers work during the day, and are free to hack open source code (and are encouraged to do so) at night.

Just a hunch...but in three years I think the Open Source community will look at Microsoft in a VERY different manner than they do today.