[GRASS5] Licence problem? SCS

[Thierry Laronde]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 12:51:47PM -0500, Thomas Adams wrote:
> Thierry,
> 
> Very interesting. The differece between the U.S. and European countries 
> goes further, namely, the availability of geophysical/geographic data. 
> Again, in the U.S. the raw data is, for the most part, in the public 
> domain and is freely available. Some exceptions exist due to the the 
> problems with data access, but as technology advances and more data can 
> be stored online with easy internet access, U.S. data is freely 
> available. My understanding is that this is not the case in most of the 
> rest of the world.

This is not the case indeed at least in France: geophysical/geographic 
data is copyrighted and not generally available.

This, plus the fact that databases (for example the data about land 
plots, or the data relative to energy, water and so on, which is "owned"
by public enterprises or by some governemental agencies) are not
available on a great scale (you can ask for small extracts, but you can
not generally obtain the whole or a large subset) has produced the "GIS"
scene that is our present (in France): shattering data and GIS
development conducted inside the agencies/enterprises without
interoperability in mind which finally lead to an underuse of GIS
analysis and no scalable solution proposed to others.

Everybody knows that when one wants to keep everything he will finally
loose everything. But a lot of people seem to forget (and I think there
is at least a psychological explanation: when one wants to keep
everything, this means that he is unsure and will not make a step
outside of his world: defensive, not offensive. He will be defeated).

For me, the real progress of the humanity has been to stop to be a
hunter and to become a farmer: not stealing resources but creating ones.
Wealth is created not owned. So the importance is not owning raw data,
but making something with them. But... /*sigh*/
-- 
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde at polynum.org>
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C