[LINK] Data Freedom

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Google write:

 http://www.dataliberation.org

We intend for this site to be a central location for information on how 
to move your data in and out of Google products. Welcome.

 The Data Liberation Front

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, speaks out against lock-in time and time again:

 "How do you be big without being evil?  We don't trap end users.
  So if you don't like Google, if for whatever reason we do a bad
  job for you, we make it easy for you to move to our competitor."

The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular 
goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of 
Google products.  

This is our mission statement:

 Users should be able to control the data they store
 in any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to
 make it easier for them to move data in and out.


People usually don't look to see if they can get their data out of a 
product until they decide one day that they want to leave  

For this reason, we always encourage people to ask these three questions 
before starting to use a product that will store their data:

1. Can I get my data out at all?

2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?

3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?


The ideal answers to these questions are:

1. Yes.

2. Nothing more than I'm already paying.

3. As little as possible.

There shouldn't be an additional charge to export your data. Beyond that, 
if it takes you many hours to get your data out, it's almost as bad as 
not being able to get your data out at all.

We don't think that our products are perfect yet, but we're continuing to 
work at making it easier to get your data in and out of them.  

Visit our Google Moderator page to vote on and add suggestions on what 
you'd like to see liberated and why.

 http://moderator.appspot.com

Lastly, you can also keep track of what we're doing by subscribing to the 
Data Liberation Front Blog or by following us on Twitter: 

 http://www.twitter.com/dataliberation.

--

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Group Starts for Easy Import/Export of Data from Products 

http://archive.webpronews.com/2009a/0915.html

--

Cheers,
Stephen