[opensource-dev] [POLICY] coding the TPV policy (was: Third party viewer policy: commencement date)

[Boroondas Gupte]

Let's see where this analogy takes us ...

On 03/21/2010 06:24 PM, Kent Quirk (Q Linden) wrote:
> Think of lawyers as people who write code in an underspecified language for a buggy compiler, and you begin to understand why legalese is the way it is.
Imagine you're a law student, almost finished with your studies. Imagine
there is a publisher who's working on a book about some law topic. The
special thing about that project is, that while the publisher's hired
authors will write most of the book, an online community can participate
and help writing some parts. As you've already learned quite a bit about
the book's topic in your studies (you actually were familiar to it, even
before that), you consider to join that endeavor.

However, the book is written in a strange file format, so the publisher
has to require you to use a special text editor they provide in binary
and source. You aren't a coder, but you've recently taken a java course,
so you decide to take a look into the code before running the program.
It's written in C++. Looks close enough, you think, and actually you're
able to understand most of the code. One expression has two post
increments in it and you notice the final value would depend on
execution order.

Later, that value is used to decide whether a chunk of code is executed
that looks like it might publish your address book on some server.
Inline comments claim that that code isn't reachable, but you aren't too
sure about that. Why is that code there, then, anyway? And why should a
text editor have access to your address book? You decide to get some
council, and ask a fellow law student who's done some more coding in her
free time than you. She insists on stating that she isn't an MCSE before
every advice she gives. You think that's rather silly, though her advice
about avoiding "nasal demons" sounds reasonable.

You ask the book publisher about the issue and whether they could take
out that part of the code. They tell you to hire a C++ programmer, which
(let's just assume that for now) is quite expensive. Prohibitively
expensive even, for a student not yet earning his own money.

There's a program where the IT students of your university offer free
advice to non-IT students. You go there to ask them, assuming they can
tell you more. It turns out they can't. They mostly help foreign
students to understand MS Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc formulas,
written for the German versions (which have different function names
than the English one). Themselves they know neither English nor C++ very
well. However they warn you that the importing of standard headers at
the beginning of the code you show them might have some implications.
They aren't sure which implications.

Would you still launch that text editor?

Boroondas