An earlier blog here made us all increasingly aware of that fact that Towel Day is coming. This is also an opportunity to reflect on some of the learning’s one can take away from the HG2G.

One of the deeper thoughts contained in HG2G is that “42″ is the answer to the ultimate question of life and everything. Whether that “everything” includes lawyers we don’t know, equally we don’t know what the ultimate question was. But it highlights that answers are often meaningless, unless one knows the question and the context for the answer.

E=mc2 is an other example of an answer that remains dark until one understands the question and its context in physics. Legal documents share some of the properties of such formulas. Especially if they are well thought-out and carefully drafted, they become dense in meaning and quite confusing for most. But again, legal documents are often easier to understand once the question or problem they try to solve is known.

Having recently started working as General Counsel for the Symbian Foundation (means: as head of the legal function), I realize that many members or interested parties have questions regarding our governance documents, most notably the Patent Policy.

So, what is the ultimate question that the licenses, membership agreements and the Patent Policy try to answer? In my view it is: “How can we most successfully form a community and boost innovation around the Symbian Platform?” Experiences from other communities show two things:

1) The better understood the rules of the community are, the larger and more active becomes participation.

2) Communities tend to flourish the more balanced the rules are; favoring no-one and encouraging sharing.

Some call this latter characteristic “Creation of a level playing field”.I would call it: “Peace in the code base”.

With peace in the code base I mean that for participants in the community, the advantage of getting better software faster with more opportunity to create radically new offerings and solutions (and thus better opportunities to compete) outweighs the fact that sharing and collaboration are required.

Most of the software in the Symbian Platform is currently still shared among members only. But as we move towards licensing the platform under an open source license, the community will have to form opinions on what the rules of engagement and accepted behaviors within the community are. While courts have the ultimate word on how our legal documents are to be interpreted, the community can form a common understanding and view of what questions these documents are supposed to answer.

To facilitate this discussion is, in my view, an important part of the mission of the lawyers in the Symbian Foundation. And our goal is to create peace in the code base for the ultimate benefit of the so-called consumer, which simply means: all of us.

In many jokes lawyers are compared to sharks. I rather see us as dolphins. According to the HG2G that makes us still only the second most-intelligent life form on Earth. But it highlights that in all our difficult to read jumps and pirouettes we try to convey a message for the benefit of human kind. That message says that the rules are there to prevent and solve conflict.

In HG2G the dolphins give mankind a last gift in the form of a fish in a bowl. When glancing through the Symbian Foundation artwork, I connected immediately to an icon realizing: hey, that’s me! Here it is:

Have a nice Towel Day!
// Dietmar