Re: protection vs. sharing

52°North is an open source software initiative, which provides a
developer platform for open source software engineering in
Geoinformatics. One of our main goals is to contribute to
Geoinformatics research and to bridge the gap between open source and
proprietary, i.e. commercial software. Our active participants develop
software, i.e. computer-implemented methods, which can be used in any
kind of open standards compliant environments (open source and non open
source). Our software does in fact consume and produce data, but this
is not restricted to state-collected geospatial data

Our security services implement international standards for the
authentication and authorization of data and services. They are
software published under GPL and, as a result, are free and must be
open source. It does not matter if our software processes free
data/services or data/services requiring a fee – it does not restrict
access based on money. It is up to the user of our software to do what
he wants to do with our software according to the GPL rights.

Of course it is legitimate and understandable to demand that public
data be free of charge. But we are not only dealing with public data in
Europe, there is a great deal of data produced by companies and even
private persons. And there are many scenarios in which it is definitely
legitimate to “protect” confidential data from unauthorized access. ”If
for example I'm working with confidential data (like cancer or aids
data) then I do need to make it protected data - its confidential and
should stay that way but I need a way for distributed analysts to be
able to share that data in a secure way.” (Ian) Or, for example,
sharing sensitive data within an organization, in which only specific
users/analysts from certain offices can access the data. Once again,
this is not about free (without charge) data vs. data for a fee.

As far as INSPIRE is concerned, criticism is legitimate of course.
However, there is – at least in our opinion – a strong need to
establish a Trans-European/Europe-wide standardized network for
environmental data. There is an increasing demand for higher quality
data, i.e. with greater precision/accuracy and up-to-date data. Update
and quality management are important factors for data maintenance, but
also create considerable operating expenses. In the days of
governmental cutbacks, land surveying offices and town councils are not
being financed 100% anymore and are being forced to contemplate
business management issues. They will need to be increasingly creative
about acquiring funding for their data.

We see open source pragmatically and not merely as a question of
belief. We do not perceive a conflict between free software and any
kind of data. We search for pragmatic solutions - we build bridges.
Nothing in the world is black or white, but rather grey nuances.

--
Dipl.-Geogr. Ann Hitchcock
con terra GmbH
Martin-Luther-King-Weg 24
48155 Münster
Germany

Tel: +49 (0)251 7474 520
Fax: +49 (0)251 7474 100

email: [email protected]
http://www.conterra.de
http://www.52north.org

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