Whitehouse
Change Congress, the Participatory Culture Foundation, and Mozilla have released open-government.us, a set of guidelines for President Elect Obama when dealing with
You can read the rationale for the principles at open-government.us. Put briefly, the three principles are:
1. No Legal Barrier to Sharing (law (copyright law) should not block sharing);2. No Technological Barrier to Sharing (code (limitations on downloads, for example) should not block sharing;
3. Free competition (no alliances should favor one commercial entity over another, or commercial over noncommercial entities).
Some have framed these as “demands” made of the administration. That’s like saying the mouse can make demands of the lion. We’re not making demands; we’re describing good policy. Or at least, good policy as we see it.
“Ideally, that format should be nonproprietary. But so long as the content is freely licensed (Principle #1), and free access is secured (Principle #2), transcoding would not be inhibited.” Is that really true? I never figured out just how legal that was. What about royalties? Doesn’t that inhibit transcoding? Come on, just make clear statements. if he doesn’t meet them, he doesn’t meet them. I guess the point is to make room for people to fail, and still be considered successful. I think it’s silly. When the Wheeler Declaration was being drafted, point #3, “The university embraces free software and open standards”, used to have a postfix that read something like “when such an alternative exists”. In both of these cases, I think it’s silly to add the padding.