Open Source Legislation

I don't usually cross-post from my iPad Lawyer blog, but I have just posted a review of the iLegal legislation App on the iPad, which might be of interest to lawyers generally (even if you aren't an Apple iDevice user).

iLegal uses legislation from the UK Statute Law Database and my research into the latter has started me thinking again about what I have seen called "open source government"... that is about how the laws which govern us should be made easily and readily available to all.

The new legislation.gov.uk service seems to be taking steps toward this (see the recent post by Nick Holmes on Free Legal Web for details), but isn't it time that a fully updated version of all legislation was made available without the need to trawl through "Tables of Legislative Effect" to find the final version?

This would also allow developers such as iLegal to have access to a full API of completely up to date legislation.

Could this really be that hard to implement technically?