[okfn-discuss] Open Service Definition (revisited)

[Luis Villa]

On 8/20/07, Mike Linksvayer <ml at creativecommons.org> wrote:
> 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.

Not only is lots of free software currently Windows-only, at one time
*all* free software was proprietary-OS only, and my sense is that the
current service situation is a lot closer to that period historically
than it is to the modern situation (where there are multiple viable
Free/Open operating systems, like Debian.)

This doesn't necessarily mean that we should allow non-free services
in this way, but I think it means that (realistically) some of them
have to be allowed into the stack at some point until open services
become more common, which makes Debian a tough point for comparison.

Luis