[okfn-discuss] Open Service Definition (revisited)

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 09:17 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 7/27/07, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> > Draft of an Open Service Definition
> > ===================================
> >
> > An open service is one:
> >
> >    1. Whose data is open as defined by the open knowledge definition
> > (http://opendefinition.org/) though with the exception that where the
> > data is personal in nature the data need only be made available to the
> > user (i.e. the owner of that account).
> 
> I think I know the answer to this one, but I want to double-check: is
> this intended to exclude services which depend on third-party,
> non-OKD-compliant data sources? For example, if I built a geodata
> service which was otherwise completely data and source available, but
> used google maps to display some data to users, would that be
> compliant with the definition?
> 
> >    2. Whose source code is F/OSS and *is made available*.
> 
> Similar question: if the service uses a non-F/OSS browser plugin
> (e.g., Flash) or runs on a non-F/OSS OS or system service (e.g.,
> Windows or Oracle) does that prevent it from being an open service,
> assuming all other aspects (source, data) are open?

I suspect both of these cases can be simplified and analyzed as if the
service were running on the same machine as the browser.  If the now
local service depends on non-free local program, remote services, data,
or codecs, could it ship in Debian main?  I guess 1 maybe and 2 no.
However one could expand the single-machine (or perhaps more usefully,
everything comes from a hypothetical Debian main that incorporates
everything free) such that remote dependencies are local, then 1 is also
no.

I don't know whether this is a useful analogy, but it seemed kind of
interesting to me.  Of course it leads one to be more stringent about
services than local software -- lots of free software is Windows-only,
for example.

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