[Open-Legislation] openlaws.eu EU Project starting today

Thu Apr 3 14:00:13 UTC 2014

On Thu, Apr 03, 2014 at 03:42:36PM +0200, Clemens Wass wrote:
> - we get some external support for the hosting for the initial phase
> (hosting is not covered by the EU project) but once we have traffic, this
> means costs

negligible ones.

> - we are asked by the commission to include a business plan to make this
> independent and sustainable.

i think this is the real challenge in this project. i have the strong
suspicion that self-sustainability is incompatible with an ethical licensing
of the data.

> Of course, this will rather go into a social
> entrepreneurship direction, but still, something has to come in someday to
> keep it running. We are currently thinking of models like in the Linux
> world (RedHat, Ubuntu) but we are really grateful for any ideas or links to
> successful projects!!!

the only successful models i know are based on national monopolies over such
data. or selling expertise to various lobby interests groups, you can chose
between getting paid well from industry, or feeling good for civil society.

> - being open means also that we will somehow include commercial partners if
> they want 

would that mean, that some participants to democratic governance would be
facing financial barriers to full participation? what percentage would be
affected of european citizens? would this enable some other actors to escalate
their privileges over the excluded ones?

> (even though we will strongly push open access publishing).

please do not use this term in this context, open access pertains to research
data, not legal data, that should always be in the public domain and quite
certainly also share-alike.

> So if a publisher wants to link premium content (whatever this will be in
> the future), then why not. Still, the core will be open.

are you talking about data and/or code? the data is much more important to
stay free than the code, code can always be produced, but data not. this is
also one of the problems with at4am, which erik mentioned, the code was free,
but without the data quite useless. if we'd had the data, we could build our
own solution, instead of the at4am gwt one.

-- 
otr fp: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/otr.txt