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

YA REILLY.

[tepples]

Fuck the Republican party.

Wrong O'Reilly. This is Tim, not Bill.

opensecrets.org, well almost

[tepples]

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.

West and Lexis/Nexis are going to love this.

[jcohen]

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.

Bug Tracker?

[Korin43]

Issue #15327: Government OS fails to load Constitution.inc. Error message is "But think of the children!"

Code by Lawrence Lessig

[tepples]

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.

Re:bad phrasing

[bill_mcgonigle]

You do realize that capitalism is entirely voluntary, right? If it wasn't 100% voluntary, it wouldn't be capitalism.

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.

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.

References in low to propietary standards

[MountainLogic]

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.

Re:I'm still trying to wrap my head around the tit

[buchner.johannes]

... an attempt to ride the Linux hype wave ...

There is a 'Linux hype wave'? In which universe?