On Tuesday 11 October 2005 12:28, Graham Seaman wrote: > I now find that the data is only available in book form or under a > commercial license from HMSO.
It does seem strange that the public should have to pay again to use info collected with public money in the first place, but it seems part of the landscape at the minute. A similar instance is Welsh lexical information, one of my bugbears, which means that the wheel has to be reinvented. This approach is a legacy of the Thatcher years (the idea was that the money spent by the public sector in collecting this info would be recouped by charging people to access it, so that the public sector "paid its way"), but strangely the policy has no parallel in the US, where, as you say, any statistical information collected by the Federal government must by law be made available freely. I would argue that if this info was not worth collecting for other purposes, it would not be collected, so paying for it again is unreasonable. -- Pob hwyl / Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rhydd yn Gymraeg www.cymrux.org.uk - Linux Cymraeg ar un CD _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
