Christopher Schmidt wrote: > On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 05:59:59PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> > European national government agencies that for centuries gathered > > geodata, paid for by the tax payers, and now they are selling it > > Blaming the OGC for that is ridiculous. The so-called Open Geospatial Consortium is a new player, as is OpenStreetMap.org. The general public doesn't know who these bodies are or what they stand for. Perhaps this includes some members of this list. At one point, if I remember correctly, the OGC offered to house OpenStreetMap under its umbrella, since apparently the two were working for similar goals. The names are similar enough to cause confusion. I can't fight the really big players such as Microsoft. What I can do is to make sure I stick to Linux and other open solutions, and that more people become aware of the difference. When journalists ask me if Microsoft invented the Internet I kindly explain that this was indeed not the case, and in fact they have long been an enemy of the Internet and its openness. So in this time of increasing interest for geographic information, we have a similar situation with a small open-purist stance against age-old closed monopolies. If we cannot turn the situation around immediately, we can at least work in the right direction. And so we need to know who is on our side and who is sleeping with the enemy. I cannot decide what the OGC should do. What I can do is to judge their actions. The OGC has a name that indicates they are on the open side. But it turns out they are not. Now they are also trying to tell us that DRM can be good. Who are they fooling? Their newspeak is a provocation. > > Any DRM scheme is just a means for those agencies to keep a > > lock on the data. > > And you'd rather have the data not be available at all? Correct. Do you buy music wrapped in DRM? I don't. > Making the technical means available for users to establish > protection of their data *may* lead some organizations to > provide more data, Don't call them "users". They are government agencies. We are the users. And we release our data in the public domain or using Creative Commons licenses. We, the users, don't need DRM. This is not a symmetric game. -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
