Open Source Effort To Codify America's "Operating System" Online

Rubinstien writes "O'Reilly Radar is reporting on an effort to produce Law.gov, 'America's Operating System, Open Source.' The group Public.Resource.Org seeks to 'create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.gov. [They] envision Law.gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.' According to its new website, 'Law.gov would be similar to Data.gov, providing bulk data and feeds to commercial, non-commercial, and governmental organizations wishing to build web sites, operate legal information services, or otherwise use the raw materials of our democracy.'"

Comments

Bills are patches

[tepples]

Of course the U.S. Code has revision control. The actual bills look like patches: "Title 17, U.S. Code, section 301, is amended by striking 'foo' and inserting 'bar'." Try reading the Sonny Bono Act to see exactly how the U.S. copyright term got extended.

Waiting for the User Model

[FatherDale]

I deeply love this idea -- rationalizing our Bizarro World legal code, shining light in the dark corners, showing ourselves and the world who we are. Having seen a number of open source projects go all faily because they were dominated by one person/cabal, though, I'll wait until I see how they're going to distribute the workload before I sign up.

Difference between Law and Code

[Zarf]

Laws can and must be broken. No government can survive the stringent enforcement of its own laws. This is the fundamental difference between law and procedural computer code. Law requires judgment while code merely requires execution.

On the level that this project seeks to work, however, the task might not be completely foolish.