Peter Murray-Rust: ‘The Global South is seen to be doing things better, it only lacks a unified critical mass’ – Open Knowledge Foundation blog

"Peter Murray-Rust: The idea of public open started with software, with Richard Stallman’s freedoms and similar things in the 80s. I would say that until the cloud and the mega-corporations have come along, open software has been a success. A little over a decade ago, there was a big momentum but since 2013-14s it died and the corporates came to realise that there were vast amounts of wealth to be made by enclosing open. We’ve seen it in all areas. There were great inroads into the public domain and massive investments in lawyers to sue people who don’t support corporates. My own area is scholarly publications, which is one of the worst at the complete travesty of everything. The whole thing at best is incredibly messy today. You cannot rely on something a hundred years old being in the public domain, as it could well be owned by a corporation. In any area where you land, you don’t know how you’re going to go out, as there’s no roadmap. For example, who owns the map of Britain? Who owns the postcodes of Britain? Who owns timetables? Who owns this sort of thing? There’s actually no expectation that they will be open. It’s all scattered all over.  At least I find that most governments are largely on the side of open. I saw recently that the US government is now funding open knowledge networks. Nothing to do with OKFN, but it’s the technology to build knowledge graphs from all public knowledge. This is really good if they’re able to make it happen.  But in general terms, we’re no nearer knowing whether we’re going to win these battles. A lot of these things are worthy endeavours, but they’re not backed by the force of law. Until we have the force of law, and corporations are fined for this sort of thing, we’re never going to get compliance...."