[cmurf]

I agree the compelling of work is more convincing than the court compelling speech stated or withheld. But code is a language, it's not just building, it's something of a hybrid. And the court order requires both the creation of new code, as well as the inhibition (deletion) of previous code, so it's telling Apple to change their speech as well as their reputation using their own labor to do so.

Almost certainly this expertise is billable to the government, and won't take $100 million, I'd be surprised if it took $1 million, but what do I know?

The more concerning thing is FBI almost can't lose. If they lose the case in court, they've put pressure, will continue to put pressure, on the public and Congress to change this in law, which is why I think it's important to establish constitutional reasoning for why this is a bad idea.

[kenshaw]

Well the question would be, who gets to dictate the size/scope of the project and the rate charged to the government? Is any person outside of Apple really qualified to make that claim? It's not open source code, so Apple could make any claim they wanted. Also, who says they would have to put their 'A' players on this? Why not back-burner that with specially hired 'E', and 'F' level developers? Charging $700-$1000/hour might seem high, but on a custom development project may not be too far out of line.

At the end of the day, there really is no way the government will succeed here, you really can't force Apple's developers to do this, as they could just tell the government to go pound sand. The only way they could get it done is through threat of violence/incarceration or by gigantic sums of money. The government can't really argue that Apple with its billions in profits, that their developers' time isn't worth a few billion.

[zardo]

>It's not open source code, so Apple could make any claim they wanted.

You don't get to play games like this with the judiciary. They can require you to allow an outside auditor to review the code.