Adaptive Path Blog

During OSCON last week, Tim O’Reilly raised the issue of Open Source Licenses and their applicability today. His subsequent blog post, Open Source Licenses are Obsolete, goes into more detail and is worth the read. His thesis is that open source licensing is less significant in the current climate where many of the important web sites, despite being built on open source software, provide services rather than software. He uses this statement as a call to develop an open services definition, encompassing services and perhaps data, in the same vein as the original open source definition.

This issue reminded me of a series of discussions we had internally when developing Measure Map. We felt that the user’s data belonged to them and that it was important to provide some access to that data beyond the application itself. There were several challenges. Some of the data was so specific to our application that it wouldn’t be meaningful out of context. Also, the amount of data we were collecting was enormous and keeping detail data for every user for all time wasn’t feasible. We had to have many back and forth discussions about data retention. Jumping to consider not just data but services as well, each site thinking about these issues will likely have unique challenges and I’m uncertain whether a definition general enough to apply to all can be specific enough to be meaningful. As a start in the right direction though, I would love to see sites being transparent about their practices and policies just as has become increasingly common with privacy policies. At least that way users can have clear expectations about how open, or not, the site they’re considering investing their time and data with may be.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Conference commentary, Idealism, uncensored. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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