[open-bibliography] Mendeley and open data...

[William Waites]

 On 10-08-31 10:35, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>>  It's a waste of time and effort worrying about this.
> Something being online is *surely* not sufficient to make it open?
> Just because a picture is online this does not mean I am free to reuse
> it for any purpose. Part of the raison d'etre of the OKF is to promote
> the use of licenses (Creative Commons, Open Data Commons, ...), which
> enable and encourage people to use material for any purpose.

How I wish it weren't necessary though. On a more
philosophical level it is a gigantic counterproductive
waste of time and effort for society as a whole to spend
so much energy trying to make what are in my view
essentially fraudulent ownership claims over ideas.

Unfortunately they do, and vested intellectual property
interests have a lot of money and power. So organisations
like OKF and the FSF are necessary to protect the rest
of us. An unfortunate consequence of this is that *we*
have to spend some time and effort thinking about things
like licenses when we would rather be doing interesting
things with software and data.

Pretending the problem doesn't exist won't make it go
away.

Cheers,
-w

-- 
William Waites           <william.waites at okfn.org>
Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK

RDF Indexing, Clustering and Inferencing in Python
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