We need an Open Service Definition

There’s a buzz at GUADEC, an open source computer desktop conference in Birmingham right now, about the idea of the Online Desktop. Increasingly we all use web services rather than local applications, and store our own personal knowledge in other people’s proprietary formats and software. GMail rather than Outlook, Flickr rather than iPhoto.

Just as the Open Knowledge Definition protects our public knowledge, we also need something to protect our private data. Here’s what the Gnome people are saying about the idea of an Open Service Definition:

We need a Free Services License, Open Service Definition, Free Terms of Service, or whatever we want to call it. I see more and more people talking about this, even aside from the GNOME Online Desktop conversation. Topics to cover in an Open Service Definition might include ability to export your personal data, your right to own your data’s copyright, etc. There may also be a requirement to use an Affero GPL type of license. This is very open-ended and unclear at the moment.

To me the reason open source works is that multiple parties with competing interests can collaborate on the software. What would make multiple parties interested in collaborating on a service? Probably a fairly radical-sounding set of requirements. But the GPL was pretty radical-sounding too, many years ago.

(from Havoc Pennington’s blog)

And perhaps, in addition to protecting our private data, the same definition could reward services which use and promote open knowledge. Something using data from OpenStreetMap should perhaps be more likely to be branded an Open Service than something which uses Google Maps.

Related posts:

1. Response to OfCom’s Public Service Publisher Consultation The Open Knowledge Foundation made a joint response in association with the [Open Rights Group](http://www.openrightsgroup.org and Free Culture UK) to OfCom’s Public Service Publisher consultation (officially titled: A new approach to public service content in the digital media age). The...
2. An Open Search Service: Regulating Search the Open Way The inspiration for writing this, as well as much of the information contained herein, came from the search Roundtable which took place at the IDEI Toulouse ‘Conference on the Software and Internet Industries’ on January 20th 2007. An earlier version...
3. Free Cultural Works Definition v1.0 Released Having been working on the very similar Open Knowledge Defintion since Summer 2005 (with a v1.0 released in September last year) we were very interested when http://freedomdefined.org/ launched last May. Now after ten months of work they’ve released a stable,...