How broad is as "personal in nature" for the purposes of part 1. of the Open Software Services Definition? It seems to only include secret data - for example personal emails, or my private calendar.
There seems to me a category of data which is personal/private, but where the data is not secret. It is just the user only wants it using in ways they control. For example: 1) My own blogs posts are data that I'm happy to be publically viewable, but could be sufficiently personal I don't want to give them away as open data (e.g. I might want to tell a personal anecdote in context on my website, but not want it to appear as lines in a broadway musical) 2) I might want to share photos of myself on a photo sharing site for my friends and anybody in the world to look at there, but for privacy reasons not want them to be taken and used as the next face of l'Oreal. Which leads to the more general question - if the users of a service want to manage their own data with the service, but they want that data to be neither open nor secret (but somewhere inbetween), can the service still be OSSD? So for example I could fork gitorious (an open source code hosting service http://gitorious.org/projects/gitorious), and allow secret repositories, with a simple interface for getting your data out of your private repository (git pull :). Call this fictional site private-gitorious. I think it would comply with the OSSD. Then suppose I fork gitorious, but let people host in public non-open source software on it, but for which the source code is available (e.g. Microsoft shared source style). Call this shared-gitorious. I would still make the source code of gitorious open (I'd have to, by the Affero GPL), and obviously people would be able to get their own data. Indeed, anybody would be able to get anybody's data. Just *other* people wouldn't be able to reuse it. In many ways private-gitorious is more "closed" than shared-gitorious, yet it is, I think, more clearly OSSD compliant. Apologies if you've covered this already. Francis -- Stamp your MP! -- http://www.theyworkforyou.com/video/ _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
