Obama Announces Open Data Policy With Executive Order 94
In an overdue but welcome move, President Obama today issued an executive order mandating "open and machine-readable data" for government-published information. Also, kodiaktau writes "In a move to make data more readily available, the United States of America has announced the Project Open Data and has chosen GitHub to host the content." Ars has a great article on the announced policy, but as you might expect, it comes with caveats, exceptions, sub-goals and committees; don't expect too much change per day, or assume you have a right to open data, exactly, in the eyes of the government, but — "subject to appropriations" — it sounds good on paper. (I'd like the next step to be requiring that all file formats used by the government be open source.)
Re:Only right use of an Executive Order I've seen (Score:5, Informative)
Growing wheat for your own use has been held to be "interstate commerce." So much for that argument. Don't quote judicial decisions as part of a logical argument, they're two different worlds.