[open-development] Hosting Open Development

Fri Sep 16 07:46:12 UTC 2011

Let me add a short story I mentioned at some talks.

1TB USB Drives go for some €100 now (at least around here in Spain). In a conversation with a former government client, we discussed about the costs of setting up an Open Data infrastructure. And we stuck at data storage cost. For him, 1TB costed €18,000. Why that? Well, it's government data, should be safe, secure, replicated in at least two data centers at least 30Km away from each other, etc., etc.

We then went into the discussion around Quality of Service. People outside government should be able to build a business on top of Open Data, hence you need to provide them with good quality information, good APIs, good response times, etc., etc.

I faced these questions (and many others related to this topic) several times. It's not as easy nor cheap as one could think. 

Josema.

-- 

Jose M. Alonso
Program Manager, Open Data
World Wide Web Foundation
email: josema at webfoundation.org
twitter: @josemalonso
skype: josema.alonso
http://www.webfoundation.org

El 16/09/2011, a las 04:50, Patrick Anderson escribió:
> Tobias Eigen wrote:
>> it doesn't necessarily cost alot to host open data.
> 
> I doesn't seem expensive, but many people just do
> not know how to administer a web-site, and could
> hardly be expected to deal with complexities and/or
> extra expense of exposing their IP to others...
> 
> I'm also, in the end, talking about ownership of the
> ISP and wires and cables and fiber and satellites,
> and ALL the Physical Sources required to host our
> GNU Free Culture.
> 
> We pay more than cost when we do not co-own the
> Physical Sources (the material assets) needed to
> host any and all types of production.
> 
> Many people (including my parents) cannot afford
> the expense of connecting to the internet or the
> excessive fees of the cell-phone industry.
> 
> Imagine a village deploys a simple 802.11n phone
> network for it's own purposes - where the members
> pay all the costs but do not pay Profit because they
> do not even buy the Product - they own it already!
> 
> But more immediately we can collectively co-own
> the computers of a datacenter to make file-sharing
> and things like email available for 'Freedom' ...
> 
> But first we will need to develop a legally binding
> Social Contract that we can apply to those assets
> to constrain ourselves in a manner similar to the
> goals of the GNU GPL - but instead of using
> Copyright to enforce Copyleft, we will be using
> Property Rights to enforce Property Left.
> 
> 
> Patrick Anderson
> http://ImputedProduction.Blog.com
> 
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