Re: Design issues 5-star data section tidy up

On 3/10/11 9:47 AM, Damian Steer wrote:
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> On 10/03/11 13:34, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>> On 3/10/11 2:27 AM, Christopher Gutteridge wrote:
>>> "Is that bad? For Linked Data to be useful, you need to be able to mix
>>> and share.". Sorry but that's simply not true. For it to be useful *to
>>> you*, perhaps, but (Closed) Linked Data still has massive value as a
>>> technology and not all data should or can be fully open!
>> "Open" is about Standards. It isn't about Public or Private access.
> "
> How Can I Make My Data Open?
>   1. Make your data publicly available!
>      If your data isn’t publicly available then you make it hard for
>      others to use it (or even decide whether to use it).
>   2. Apply a suitable open data license.
>      Explicit licensing is essential to provide clarity and certainty to
>      users and reusers (and is needed even if you want your data to be
>      ‘public domain’).
> " [1]
>
> In what I've read the emphasis is on 2 (e.g. [2]), but 1 seems pretty
> important.
>
> Damian
>
> [1]<http://www.opendatacommons.org/guide/>
> [2]<http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1526/version/1>

Yes, but #2 ("apply a suitable open data license")  is basically 
overeach of the ideological variety. Basically land grab on use of 
"Open". IMHO.

No different to Stallman's land grab re. "Open" and "Free" in the early 
days of Open Source and Free Software.

"Open" has historically been about standards that facilitate 
interoperability. A computer program creates or changes a chunk of data 
and persist to a location. Question is: can another program access and 
make sense of the same chunk of data?

All the InterWeb adds to the above is scale. It doesn't alter the 
fundamental issue. Licensing has zilch to do with one program being able 
to access and understand a chunk of data created by another program.

I speak as a person who's done many an "Open" dance from the days when 
Unix was the focal point of "Open". Reusing the same data across mini 
computers was the focal point re. DBMS products. "Free" and "Open" have 
always ended up being abused by marketing or ideology.


Kingsley


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-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Received on Thursday, 10 March 2011 15:17:28 UTC