[Freegis-list] Re: Free data? It doesn't exist

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Fri, May 05, 2000 at 10:29:00AM +0300, Pekkinen Pasi wrote:
> Maybe it is just because of my limited understanding, but I find that there is
> much silly talk about free data. First of all, free data does not exist,
> somebody must always pay for it, simple as that.

It is not silly at all. The term 'free' in 'Free Data' is not to
be mixed with the term 'free' in 'free beer'. It is also a matter
of languages - I know that in some the term 'gratis' and 'free' are the
same which makes it diffcult to discuss about Free Software or
Free Data.

Now: 'Free' is not equal to 'gratis'. Building Free Data cost money as Free Software
does. Nontheless Free Software is (or can be) commercial software. The
same applies to Free Data. Hence the simple methods of our economic system
can work to produce Free Data.
It was tried to avoid this problem of terms by saying "Open Source Software",
but this does reveal its own problems again, so the term 'Free' is still
the best available one for the english language.

One trick of Free Data/Free Software is: its development is not gratis,
but it is paid only once.

> Secondly,  as NMAs are government agencies their budgets are controlled and
> planned under the supervision of respective ministries and are many times
> directed by much broader national pricing policies.  The NMAs aren't in many
> cases, allowed to do as they please e.g. give away data for free.  It is up to
> the national governments to take such decisions and allocate required funding.

True, local authorities have often a maxime to gain their expenses back
by charging for their services. For NMAs this might show up as a dead-end
more quickly than for any other. At least in Germany, high-quality vector
data were created. The costs were immense and so are the costs for
an non-exclusive non-transferable right to use them. In the end,
almost no one uses these data.
The governments should change the maxime just as in the US where data
produced with public money automatically belong to the public (well, except
for classified data of course).

> Thirdly, if we think of the US case where federal data is available for merely
> extraction costs, it is the federal government which covers the costs of doing
> such.  This pricing policy is not applied to state level data.  In the European
> case, the analogy would be that the Commission would cover the costs for
> producing free European level data.

I would appreciate that. However, our national governments and the Commission
cover the costs of numerous infrastructural expenses. Why not also Free Data?
Economy would benefit from this since there would be less need to pay data.
A dynamic economy will take advantage of better infrastructure and be able
to offer improved severices based on this infrastructure.

Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner				http://intevation.de/~jan/

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