Larry Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School, is leaving the West Coast to head to the Stanford of the East, Harvard Law School, according to Harvard. Lessig used to teach at Harvard Law School, so it should prove to be a comfortable change, and perhaps in keeping with his shift from "West Coast code" to "East Coast code", to an emphasis on overcoming corruption in politics. (No, not that kind of corruption.)
Lessig was my professor at Stanford Law School, and became a mentor to me there, though I fought his ideas for the first year that I worked with him. In his class "Open Sources" I rejected what I then viewed as a cavalier attitude toward the growth of open source: he saw a rosy future for open source, but I was less sanguine, believing that without viable business models open source was doomed to niche status.
We were both right. As it turned out, open source has done just fine, but precisely because we've figured out how to integrated open-source code with commerce. My early foray into this idea was, in fact, my third-year thesis paper [PDF], which Lessig advised.
I've developed a huge amount of respect for Lessig over the years. He's an exceptional person, and an amazing scholar. I'll be sad to see him leave Stanford for Harvard, but if it makes him more geographically proximate to the problems he's trying to solve, all the better for the industry.
(Credit:
Electronic Frontier Finland)
The terrible "standards" process for Open Office XML (OOXML) just got a new wrinkle today. Electronic Frontier Finland analyzed the OOXML results and compared them to the Corruptions Perceptions Index. Guess what? There is a material correlation between the two.
Surprise, surprise. Put into logical language, all crooks vote for OOXML. :-)
Of course, the data/correlation needs to be taken with a grain of salt (or maybe the Salt Flats), but the one thing that is probably not at issue is that the process was tainted by corruption, however benevolently some may want to spin it. It's unfortunate that people should stoop so low for a few billion dollars in sales. Integrity isn't worth the price (and I think both sides are probably culpable, though my bias has me seeing more on the Microsoft side).
True, he told us five years ago that he was moving on, but then he didn't. But now, I think Larry has left the free culture movement "for real," as he announced today. Larry was my mentor and thesis advisor at Stanford Law School, and someone for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect (though he hated me when I took Open Sources from him - I contradicted every point he made, as I was heavily skewed toward proprietary open source back then).
What will he be doing now? Focusing on reducing "corruption," as he defines it:
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