I’m about to sign the agreement since there are about half a dozen bugs that cause the OG regression tests to fail in Hong Kong.
However, I printed out the agreement, signed it, and started scanning it back in, and I was wondering if there a better way of signing these sorts of agreements now that we are in the digital age. For example, if I take my PGP signature and return the document with a statement that I agree to the terms of the document, would that be legally sufficient? What if I take a PDF image and overlay it with an image of my signature.
Alternatively is there a fax number that I can fax the signed docs to? It would be much easier than to rescan.
The reason all of this is of interest to me is that one of the projects that I am working on here in HK is “prop shop in a box, just add money”. I’d like to set things up so that anyone who wants to start up a prop shop can do it quickly and efficiently. Download an install package from the internet, press a few buttons, and boom, you’ve created the necessary legal structure, filed the regulatory filings, and you have a prop shop in a few hours with an OpenGamma backend all ready to run and with friendly support from OG ready to take your questions (for a reasonable fee).
So I’m interested in reducing the turn around time for drafting/writing legally valid documents.
Just to let people know what I ended up doing. I used the PDF annotation function of xournal to sign the document and send it back. I tried to use OpenPGP to sign, but it turned out to be too complicated since I haven’t generated my keys yet.
No worries. Let me know when you’ve gotten the e-mail, since I have some pending changes on github.
One thing that I’m looking at here in HK is to figure out ways of streamlining all of the legal bureaucracy necessary to run a small financial startup. I know of some people that are working with the HK government to draft standard agreements for startup financing.
The nice thing about HK is that because it is a city-state, if there is some legal annoyance that it is getting in the way of business, you can actually e-mail someone and get the rule changed. Good luck with that in the US/UK.
One thing that the HK government is looking at is having HK be a trading center for IP. One thing that I’d like to do is to make sure that whatever comes out of that process that it is open source friendly.
