iPhones and Public Records

Watching the row over the leaked iPhone prototype leaves me a little puzzled. Less about the details of the case--it's fairly easy to think of some chump "finding" a phone in a bar, heck, those phones are thief magnets. Most everyone I know who owns one (including myself), has had one stolen. I'm honestly surprised that there's never been a stolen prototype before! And why on earth would you put it in an existing iPhone case--wouldn't some really ugly case be a much better disguise? But I digress. It's the "trade secret" idea that is so foreign to me.

As a civil engineer, most of my work is very public. All projects, public and private, have to meet a set of minimum requirements for drainiage, pavement, zoning, structural, and so on. Those standards are published by cities and trade organizations. But more than that, the actual project construction plans become public records as soon as the project is completed and opened. All you need to do is call the city engineering department and ask for the "As-Builts" for a particular project, file a Freedom of Information Act request, pay a small fee, and they'll give you either a CD or physical copes of the plans. And if you say "Hi! I'm X from Y Engineering", they may not even force you to file a formal request. Incidentally, his is also why I've always found harassment of the photographers over "security" concerns to be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard--why bother with crummy photos when you can get the actual engineering docs? There are of course exeptions to this--sensitive buildings will get their plans hidden and made confidental, but this is rare relative to the total number of private developments.

Many civil engineering firms are much more dependent on service. It's much more important to communicate with your client about the engineering process, the city submission process, and any relevant laws or regulations you have to follow. The paradigm is more like that of a law firm. You want to reuse as much work as you can--but you have to adapt it. You get the work done, obviously, but your client is really paying you to act as his or her guide. Every case and site is unique enough that "copying and pasting" typically won't work. And forget trade secrets--not only can your competitors look at your plans, they have to in order to build adjacent projects and have the utilities and storm water systems ect. interface properly. In this sense, I might guess that this promotes better quality than with heavily protected computer code, since mistakes can't just be corrected with a patch. Chewing gum and duct-taped solutions are open for the world to see.

If this is starting to sound a bit familiar, it should. It has some similarities to the open-source world--the one I'm thinking of now is Red Hat. It's reusable software, with a for-profit vendor that primarily sells customer service and some upkeep. Will true technical solutions become less novel and less common? And if so, will a more service based market develop?