Andrea Di MaioOne of the interesting consequences of the Open Government Directive has been a burst of enthusiasm by some of the open source software proponents and vendors (see here and here) who have immediately established a link between the use of open source and the directive.
For those who have been following some of the vintage discussions about government and open source, this will probably sound like a déjà vu. I honestly thought that people had finally given up pushing the confusion between open source and open standards or open formats, but here we are again.
I would argue that open government data and open source software have nothing to do. Commercial software can produce and use open formats today. What needs to be open is the data and not the software used to process it. Open source software has its own pros and cons and if governments feel they need to take positive actions to encourage or even mandate its use, so be it, but please do not claim this will make data any more open.
I could have taken this argument a few years ago, when Microsoft and other commercial vendors were holding to their proprietary data formats, but now that those battles have been fought (nor sure who has won though), let’s focus on what really needs to be open.
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4 pulo December 14, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Whether a government agency uses open source software or not to produce and distribute/publish open data is one thing. A healthy selection of open source code available to consumers of open data will allow them to analyze, mash-up, visualize, and otherwise invent innovative uses for open data. If only commercial software is available on the user’s side the cost and licensing barriers may act to inhibit innovative uses of open data. In my opinion, there is a relationship between open data and open source, and the benefits of open data are multiplied if there is easy-to-use open source software that can process the open data. One man’s opinion.
5 Roberto Galoppini December 15, 2009 at 4:52 am
Hi Andrea,
here an excerpt from the memorandum:
“To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.”
If you need to buy an application to re-use that information you’re putting in place restrictions. If it’s not about open it’s, at least, about free.
6 Andrea Di Maio December 15, 2009 at 6:00 am
@Roberto
I guess it is all a matter of how one interprets “restrictions”. If you are obiged to download OR purchase an OSS apps to use that data, this could be a much greater restriction than even publishing data in a non-open format which is likely to be read by most people.
I am actually wondering whether the “open format” requirement is not a restriction in itself, but then I read “To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions” and realize that agencies can still publish files with a “.doc” extension
7 Andrea Di Maio December 15, 2009 at 6:04 am
@Pulo
I’m sure that the most likely mashers and exploiters of open data will be geekish developers with plenty of open source, which is fine. If one wants to “bring this to the masses”, then one should consider mainstream tools and platforms. Further most of these tools will be accessible “as a service” anyhow, so who cares about whether they are open source or not? People will choose depending on cost and convenience.
As I said, no place here to fight another, rather backward, open source battle.
8 Dag Petter Svendsen December 16, 2009 at 4:11 pm
\I would argue that open government data and open source software have nothing to do.\
I would argue the opposite: Open data is of no help if the software you need in order to mine the data is too costly. In order for the \analytical crowds\ to exploit open government data, open source software like RapidMiner, KNIME or R are obvious alternatives to commercial platforms, both regarding costs and because the open government movement and the open source software movement share the same ethics (I hope).