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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.'"
Anyone got an RSS feed for bribes accepted per politician?
It's open access to this information that democracy is built upon.
Fuck the Republican party.
Wrong O'Reilly. This is Tim, not Bill.
Spectacular idea - maybe, just maybe, if we remember what could be happening, and what shouldn't be happening, things will shape up a bit. Both sides seem hell bent on tearing up everything.
I perused the top level sales pitch docs - can't find any good details on how they'd want to organize it. subdomains for each state? subdomains for each type of law? A giant wikipedia? If info can't be easily found on the site through intuitive methods, it's a "failure" from the start (assuming the intent is availability of the data...).
Anyone have any info on such (ie, how it is going to be organized)?
What does open access to laws have to do with operating systems or open source? Sounds like an attempt to ride the Linux hype wave, and it seems to be succeeding so far.
Anyone got an RSS feed for bribes accepted per politician?
I don't know of one, but I can see an Atom feed of headlines from a site that also has lists of the top contributors to reelection campaigns of representatives like Rep. Boner.
For eons, West and Lexis have been making staggering sums reselling primary legal material to all and sundry. Best of luck to this project in prying that material out of their hands, and in surviving the massive lobbying and astroturfing that will ensue before the project achieves that goal.
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
Issue #15327: Government OS fails to load Constitution.inc. Error message is "But think of the children!"
What does open access to laws have to do with operating systems or open source?
There's a reason why they call it a "legal code", and not just because of Dr. Lessig's book.
Sounds like an attempt to ride the Linux hype wave, and it seems to be succeeding so far.
"Law like a free software project" would at least require a patch to the patent code to make it more efficient at rejecting obvious inventions.
AOS discs in mail.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
You do realize that capitalism is entirely voluntary, right?
Not if large capitalists form a cartel on an essential good or service.
Refactor 200+ years of code written by a constantly changing development team with no central management, revision control, scope checking, flowcharting let alone UML diagrams, and text editor consisting of a feather and some ink?
Sign me the fuck up!
The only pure capitalism I see is at local self-organized farmers' markets. Ironically, largely patronized by people who vehemently criticize capitalism.
Just about everything else is taxed and regulated, which perturbs real market function.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
What does open access to laws have to do with operating systems
Suing someone over any disagreement is standard operating procedure in the United States.
Won't this destroy Lexis and Westlaw's business model?
that is the best description of politics I've ever read. it is a permanent truth.
Go home and shave your giant head of smell with your bad self
Is this part of Obama's promise to open source the government by letting us read bills before they are voted on? Will congress actually get a chance to read them here?
In many technical areas, such as building codes, the law will say something like, "The city of Nowhere adopts in whole the International Building Code of 2007." The problem is that the International Building Code and most other codes are written and copyrighted by private organization that charge lots of money for a copy.
... an attempt to ride the Linux hype wave ...
There is a 'Linux hype wave'? In which universe?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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.
Run a virus scan in safe mode to remove the parasites, aka lobbyist.
I'm pretty sure that they mean the effort itself is going to be based on open-source technologies, and not that there is an effort to open source the legislative procedure, which is something all together different. We have elected legislators to make laws, and citizens can petition directly or in groups (some people call them "special interest groups," but only because they aren't a member of one... when it's their own "special interest" then its magically a "citizen's organization" or something equally gay).
"Open Sourcing" the constitution and the laws really makes no sense. Creating a free service, built on open source technologies with open APIs for accessing data in open formats so that anyone can have access at any time to the text of laws makes a great deal of sense and is something which should have been done a long while ago, because thomas.loc.gov kind of pisses me off.
http://thomas.loc.gov/ Read anything you want. You don't need the president's permission to read bills before they become law. Though, unlike your representatives, you're not bound by due diligence to do so.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
It'll be like digg -- you can vote a bill up or down and the most popular ones are passed :-P
It is outsourcing the reading process. And to those who don't like the system people will say -- similar to as they do now with wikipedia -- "if you don't like the bill, just vote it down'
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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.
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