Unfortunately, I think Luis is right. We need lawyers. We don't need them to go around erecting toll booths on the interoperability bridge, but we need them to help us think of how to look stodgy and dull while being cool and cutting edge.For better or for worse, social producers (not just software, but wikipedia, etc.) are becoming so successful that we often have to interface with the real world. We’ve got two Unfortunately, I think Luis is right. We need lawyers. We don’t need them to go around erecting toll booths on the interoperability bridge, but we need them to help us think of how to look stodgy and dull while being cool and cutting edge.For better or for worse, social producers (not just software, but wikipedia, etc.) are becoming so successful that we often have to interface with the real world. We’ve got two options. First, we can either stay small and under the radar, allowing us to keep operating on a handshake basis. This will work for some products and some producers, but I think many of us want to have a broader impact than that. For those of us who do think that social production is going to have a serious and broad impact on the world, we can use the tools the rest of the world has developed to relate to that real world- laws and legal experts, aka lawyers. I’m pretty sure there is no third option to ‘be big but somehow still avoid lawyers.’ (Feel free to convince me otherwise; I’ll save at least $90K in school bills if you do. 🙂 At best, we might be able to avoid some of the regulation which has affected every other pervasive industry, but even without regulation by government, when you’re big you have to relate to other private parties- corporations, less trusting individuals, etc. The bigger you get, the more those relationships are mediated by lawyers, in order to make sure that all sides can eventually trust each other once the lawyers are gone. The need to defend and define our success, in part by using the law and legal experts, is a virtually inevitable byproduct of our success- the rest of the world is not just going to let us be if we have the impact we hope we can have.I agree, though reluctantly. I spent some time on the phone yesterday with friends on opposite sides of a legal dispute. It’s clear that the law won’t resolve their problems – talking and compassion will. And it’s equally clear to me that the law much of anything else. If we have to resort to the brute edge of a legal club to resolve our differences, we’ve already lost. The law is the last refuge of the weak (which is good), but also the desperate weapon of the bully (which is bad). On the former side, I do think lawyers can help us to craft a fascinating, productive conversation in open source. Just look what licenses like the GPL and Apache have done for software, and what the Creative Commons can do for media. I’m hopeful that good lawyers can turn the law to good purposes, toll bridges not being one of those good purposes…. Open Source