Unripped.org

Will data portability be a battle like free software?

It’s taken over 20 years of serious work and advocacy for the free and open source software movements to achieve their incredible succeses. While the battle certainly isn’t over (patents!), it has been won in critical areas and it’s continued success is finally feasible. Largely because FOSS is in the hands of many normal users.

FOSS advocates have spent many lawyer-years on legal issues to create a solid theory about what the world will look like without aggressive software patents and copyright abuse. But people are only now beginning to think about content ownership and what kind of disputes may come up in data portability. Beyond law, there was also a heck of a lot of code to write.

Will data portability take as long to achieve what FOSS has? For my part, I think the battle will take longer than we hope. The good news is success is as inevitable as it was for FOSS and working towards it will be at least as much fun.