Jared Bendedict succeeded in his Map Ransom mission and made, as promised, all his purchased data available for download at the Libre Map Project. (via James Fee GIS Blog)
Congratulations, great work!
I was thinking if a similar initiative would succeed here too, but I’m afraid that European copycats would need fundings similar to GNPs of some medium insular state, a bunch of excellent attorneys and a lobbyist better than Nick Nayler to buy and finally free the data of its public copyright.
It’s quite clear that collecting high quality geodata is cost intensive and since there is a noticeable political pressure on public authorities, such as most national mapping agencies are, to act like private companies it’s understandable that they don’t want or can’t distribute their core business freely.
The point is, that small European businesses, start-ups or single geo-developers who can’t afford licensing all needed European geodata are forced to test run their services and applications with American geodata, like the one at Libre Map Project, and deal with American spatial issues or to make use of one of the available geo APIs (mostly focusing the US of course).
Is it in the interest of the European Union to direct grass-root innovation from Europe to the US?
What would be the problem of making outdated European public geodata freely available? Most people would be fine with that. I believe it would ease and push innovation (anyone remembering the Lisbon Strategy?) in the geo industry a lot, simply because geo applications heavily depend, already during conceptual work and development, on data – no data, no development.
