Kragen Sitaker recently posted an essay about the equivalent of free software for online services....He points out that the movement to use online services rather than local applications greatly increases the possibility for vendor lock-in....As Ross Anderson has repeatedly emphasised the value that a vendor can extract from users is roughly equivalent to the total switching cost. With control of your data that switching cost is going to be much, much higher than with control of the user interface alone.
This focus on data brings me to a related and, in my view, even more important point. Associated with the move to online services there’s been a proliferation of web 2.0yy ‘open’ APIs. While an open API is certainly better than a closed one I think we need to understand clearly the way in which the ‘open’ in ‘open’ API is different to other forms of ‘openness’...[Cutting five specific points; worth reading.]
Open knowledge consists of three freedoms: the freedom to access, to reuse, and to redistribute. As we’ve just seen an open API however guarantees none of these...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/05/2006 02:25:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
