On 15/02/2008, Ian Forrester <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm sure I raised this a while ago but I was wondering what > peoples views of the data portability movement?
It seems to me that how "open source" is to "software freedom," or how "NLP" is to Ericksonian Hypnosis (off topic but I thought I'd throw it in as I saw Derren Brown last week :-), is how "data portability" is to the "semantic web": A way of promoting peripheral aspects of a memeplex that has central aspects that are historical, philosophical, and challenging to think about. All are attempts to trick businesses into supporting something without pointing them at the real issues, because "business people don't care about that abstract stuff." For software freedom, that has meant businesses only deal with the peripheral issues and end up in conflict with the original movement. This is harmful for businesses and the software freedom movement, IMO. Eg, the British proprietary software company Xara was in trouble when Microsoft launched Acrylic and Adobe discarded Freehand to consolidate the proprietary drawing program market on Illustrator, so they made most of their drawing program free software. But they kept the small but core geometry library proprietary, so the software freedom community had no interest in it, and so Xara died. Will data portability get Web 2.0 companies to allow you to export some minor aspects of data, like your social graph, from one silo to the next? Or will it get hermetic Web 2.0 companies to support the semantic web properly? http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22data+portability+workgroup%22+sparql is not promising. Also, what bright spark came up with principle 11 of DPW? "Politics can stay at the door" is absurd, since the whole point of the DPW is political. Amusing Stallman quote: "Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." -- Regards, Dave Personal opinion only, not the views of any employers. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
