Google Data Liberation Group Seeks To Unlock Data 167
Several sources are reporting that The Data Liberation Front, a new engineering group within Google, is trying make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. They have already "liberated" about half of Google's offerings (including Blogger and Gmail) and have plans to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs in the near future. "In a blog post this morning, Data Liberation engineering manager Brian Fitzpatrick, uses a good analogy to explain why the company sees this is an important step: 'Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you - not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you're like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all. Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google's Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective.'"
Most important use case missing (Score:4, Informative)
So you can get your data out when you want to move to different sites/applications.
What about getting your data out if Google decides to stop the site/app, decides to stop the "Liberation Group", decides to delete your data from it's systems or somehow has to stop business.
This "Liberation Group" thing simply ensures you can get your data only when you least need to.
Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)
No, the idea is that making it easier to leave particular Google services makes it more likely that people will use those services in the first place, not that it makes them more likely to stay with them once they start using them.
Re:MapMaker vs. openstreetmap (Score:3, Informative)
That's what the top-ranked Data Liberation suggestion [appspot.com] is talking about - great that we can get the data out; but now allow us to use it elsewhere without fear of being sued for breach of copyrighted.