In today’s Guardian: what the new OPSI rules mean (and don’t mean)
The Office of Public Sector Information has updated (upgraded?) its rules on Click-Use licencing, saying that all government organisations that are not trading funds (ie local government too) should consider opening their source data for free.
Sounds good – but there is a catch: local government is under orders to generate as much revenue as possible. Do the two aims conflict? In Public services now have legal means to open up, Michael Cross examines the latest move as part of the Free Our Data campaign.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- OPSI opens web channel where you can ask for government data (20 September 2007; score: 32.92%)
- APPSI comes out in favour of Ordnance Survey on addressing - but it's two-edged (3 May 2007; score: 26.94%)
- Ordnance Survey in the dock again with OPSI (26 October 2006; score: 26.35%)
- Who's who after the reshuffle (12 July 2007; score: 25.99%)
- And now, OPSI sets up an "unlock that data" channel (7 July 2008; score: 22.3%)
April 15th, 2006 at 8:45 am
This is interesting. It seems to me that OPSI has provided the means to enable large amounts of public sector information to be made available on a non-exclusive, world wide free licence – if only other parts of the part up to the initiative.
Pragmatically, wouldn’t it make sense for this campaign to direct some efforts at persuading the public sector to do just that? Apart from anything it would be a good way to measures the campaigns success and will help build momentum for the free public data point of view.