Obama Announces Open Data Policy With Executive Order

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

[msauve]

"Executive orders have been held to have force of law in US History except under two cases"

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.