How Open a Platform does “Open Government” Need?

“A similar debate rages in the open source community between
those that believe that some licenses (e.g., the BSD, MIT and
Apache licenses) are “open enough,” while others would respond with
an emphatic Hell No! (or less printable words to similar
effect).

“That’s not too surprising, because the question of what “open”
means subsumes almost every other categorical question that
information and communications technology (ICT) standards and open
source folk are likely to disagree over, whether they be economic
(should a vendor be able to be implement a standard free of charge,
or in free and open source software (FOSS) licensed under a version
of the General Public License (GPL)); systemic (are standards
adopted by ISO/IEC JTC 1 “better” than those that are not); or
procedural (must the economic and other terms upon which a
necessary patent claim can be licensed be disclosed early in the
development process)?

“The reason why this background level of disagreement is
relevant today is because the Obama Administration has pledged to
use technology to bring an “unprecedented” level of transparency
and interaction in government to the people. If that’s going to
happen, though, it means that the platforms that the new
administration adopts to provide open government will have to be
open as well. Which brings us at last to the question of just what,
exactly, “open” should mean, when it comes to “open
government.””

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