ePetition Covering Public Data From The Likes Of The BBC

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2014-11-04 at 14:40 +0000, C E Macfarlane wrote:
> Now available for signatories.  Please sign if you are a UK resident and
> feel remotely able to support it:
> 
> http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/71556

Unfortunately I don't feel able to support it.

It seems to be conflating open source implementations with open data
formats, which isn't a particularly helpful thing to do.

All IT implementations have a cost, which will include such things as
permanent employees' salaries, contractors' fees, support costs for
software (including open source software) and licensing fees for
commercial software.

If the overall cost of a commercial solution is less than that of an
open source solution, there is no fundamental reason why the tiny
proportion of the cost that is "licensing fees" should be considered a
waste as the petition seems to claim.

If you want to make a petition about open access to data, then by all
means do so — but as Jon pointed out, doesn't the government *already*
have a policy which requires open access and standard formats?


It's also rather naïve to claim that purely because an institution is
government-funded, all its output should be available to the general
public without restriction. Want to see every memo ever produced by the
MOD?

-- 
dwmw2
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 5745 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/get_iplayer/attachments/20141105/9750992c/attachment.bin>