Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Why Open Data Is More Important Than Open Source

[Lucy]

2009/3/10 Simon Ward <address@hidden>:
> While catching up on my feed reading I came across this post on “Why
> Open Data Is More Important Than Open Source”[1] (Ian Davis via Planet
> RDF[2]).
[snip]
> I’m sitting in both free software and free data camps at the moment.
> Ideally everything would be free and we wouldn’t have to worry about
> where efforts should be concentrated.  What are your views?

I agree I think both are vital.

Data is valuable and often irreplaceable, unlike a proprietary program
you can't simply write a free version (okay so this does depend on the
data). However, having a free program is pointless if the data it
requires to be able to work is closed. I think OpenStreetMap is a good
example of this - we need both free data and free mapping programs in
order for it to be of any use.

The article brings up some interesting questions about free standards
as well. Governments have and continue to produce documents in
proprietary formats, so in 20 or 50 years time we will need to still
be asking Microsoft to provide copies of Word 95? I know the National
Archive service did some work a few years ago to make documents
produced in the 80s and 90s available again now by running ancient OSs
in emulators - the documents can't be converted because that risks
losing data.