[pgh-pm] PA Open Source Association.

Michael G Schwern schwern at pobox.com
Thu Feb 10 20:31:38 PST 2005


On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 06:52:10PM -0800, Robert Blackwell wrote:
> I think idea is a fantastic idea.  My only fear is that Open-Source limits us to just software. 
> It would be great if one of the goals of this group was to advise governments, transit
> authorities, and ... as to the benifits to having open interfaces into their data stores that may
> be on proprietary systems.  Sometimes they make the data available but in a really bad way.  I
> would see this group lobbying to get systems open as well has having them use open source.

A)  Don't get too far ahead of yourselves.  Expanding it from "Pittsburgh" to
"Pennsylvania" is already gulping down too much ground for a group that
hasn't even had its first meeting.

B)  With the exception of "Open Source", "Open" is pretty much a non-word
when it comes to technology.  "Open" protocols and systems seems to mean
"we'll let you look at the API documentation".  OTOH "Open Source" as a
whole better captures the ideal of interoperability and data-sharing being
suggested above.

C)  Don't worry so much about the name.  As much as you might try the 
predictions about what this group is actually going to wind up doing
will be wildly wrong so just pick something decent and go with it.  Names
are not binding nor limiting.  Why just the other day I used Perl for some 
completely impractical extracting and reporting! ;)



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