[okfn-discuss] Open Service Definition (revisited)

Tue Aug 21 04:47:44 UTC 2007

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 09:59 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 8/1/07, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> Sadly, open everywhere is fairly meaningless; the term is badly
> overloaded. My own current private draft uses 'User-Centric Service
> Definition' to avoid the ambiguity around 'open', but I'm not happy
> with that route either. Suggestions welcome :)

Yikes.  OTOH UCSD rolls off the tongue and UC San Diego needs to stop
dominating the top search results for UCSD. :)

> > On the question of
> > reliability as I have already said I don't think you can mandate this
> > and I feel it is best addressed via competition (with open data and open
> > code you can always go elsewhere or set up your own service).
> 
> I'm a fairly die-hard capitalist but remain skeptical about the power
> of competition to spontaneously force a shift in risk from the user to
> the service provider. Like the shift in software, my guess is that the
> shift in services will occur only after someone says 'this is the
> standard to be striven for' and then begins to strive for it, instead
> of just crossing our fingers and hoping that the market generates
> freedom on its own :)

You are part of the market.  Even if one considers the market to consist
only of publicly listed companies or some such silly thing, some of your
work on this was in the employ of just such an entity. :)  But this is
all beside the point.

I may have missed a cogent argument, but mandating a level of
reliability seems silly to me.  GPL doesn't regarding source
availability -- just "equivalent copying facilities" to and directions
from the location of the object code.  Similarly, I conjecture that a
service can be free when it is up, and not a service when it is down.

> In my mind, openness was successful not because it gave people access
> to source, but because it shifted *control* back to users from the
> producers of proprietary software. Source access was just one part of
> that shift.

"Openness" is pretty vague, success seems very partial, and source
(right to modify and share modifications, not just access) seems to be
the linchpin.  What were the other critical parts?  I suspect I'm just
being ignorant here, but I mean the question seriously.

> An open service definition, I believe, should seek to
> define systems which meaningfully/practically transfer control back
> from service providers to users, not merely give them access to source
> and data.

Presumably that means user controlled/transferable names.

-- 
  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:Mike_Linksvayer