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I think that would be one of the major issues. Here's how that situation is handled on the legal side in the US. Anyone is permitted to practice law for themse

I think that would be one of the major issues. Here's how that situation is handled on the legal side in the US. Anyone is permitted to practice law for themselves, but to practice law on someone's behalf, you need to be admitted to the bar. I'm not endorsing it, but I can imagine a situation where anyone can write code on their own, but to get paid to do it, you need a license (subject to ethics rules). Again, I'm not supporting the idea, but it could work that way.

cookiecaper 9y ago
>Here's how that situation is handled on the legal side in the US. Anyone is permitted to practice law for themselves, but to practice law on someone's behalf, you need to be admitted to the bar. Important caveat: companies must be represented by a licensed attorney. A non-attorney startup founder cannot represent his/her own company in court. This is technically legally compliant with "someone else" since the corporation is a distinct legal entity, but it means that if you can't afford a lawyer (and which of us working slobs can these days?) and someone sues your company you are SOL. Courts are seeing a massive rise in pro se litigants over the last 15 years, entirely because legal services are stretching to costs that put them outside the reach of non-millionaires. Law is a great example of the nightmare that software can become if we go overboard on regulation. There was once a time where becoming a self-taught lawyer was not all that different than becoming a self-taught programmer. You could learn just by "reading the law" and shadowing professionals, much like you can learn just by reading (and writing) code today. It was at least partially merit based and some of the best legal minds of the last generation came up this way. Now, you have to sacrifice 6 years of your life and easily half a million dollars to be allowed to even try to sell legal services, and the market is so flooded with low-end graduates who are stuck in this desperate situation that many of them can't even sell their services anyway, due to the extreme competition in the lower rungs (driven by student desperation to find work to pay down that massive debt and the artificially constrained supply by the ABA's excessive licensing requirements).
Sunset 9y ago
This is the worst possible idea ever. Get government out of our lives!

cookiecaper 9y ago

>Here's how that situation is handled on the legal side in the US. Anyone is permitted to practice law for themselves, but to practice law on someone's behalf, you need to be admitted to the bar. Important caveat: companies must be represented by a licensed attorney. A non-attorney startup founder cannot represent his/her own company in court. This is technically legally compliant with "someone else" since the corporation is a distinct legal entity, but it means that if you can't afford a lawyer (and which of us working slobs can these days?) and someone sues your company you are SOL. Courts are seeing a massive rise in pro se litigants over the last 15 years, entirely because legal services are stretching to costs that put them outside the reach of non-millionaires. Law is a great example of the nightmare that software can become if we go overboard on regulation. There was once a time where becoming a self-taught lawyer was not all that different than becoming a self-taught programmer. You could learn just by "reading the law" and shadowing professionals, much like you can learn just by reading (and writing) code today. It was at least partially merit based and some of the best legal minds of the last generation came up this way. Now, you have to sacrifice 6 years of your life and easily half a million dollars to be allowed to even try to sell legal services, and the market is so flooded with low-end graduates who are stuck in this desperate situation that many of them can't even sell their services anyway, due to the extreme competition in the lower rungs (driven by student desperation to find work to pay down that massive debt and the artificially constrained supply by the ABA's excessive licensing requirements).

Sunset 9y ago

This is the worst possible idea ever. Get government out of our lives!