Information Just Wants to be Free
Wikipedia has a good history of ways different people have used that expression, though not the way I am seeing it.
Maya Design & Viz did some excellent thinking around information and published a number of whitepapers around the turn of the century that still influence how I think about information. A key enabling concept is universal uniqueness of information.
“This uniqueness allows the development of tools that are information-centric, not document-centric — where information is trapped in or tightly bound by the software that created it. Freeing information allows software to be crafted that uses data in exactly the ways humans want.” – Viz
Wow – It’s not about the money. It is about free from a particular DB or software structure. It is about being free from the old structure, legacy systems, walled gardens, and being locked down. Free to be used beyond the DB structure. This is way beyond the MVC architectural pattern and into Maya’s very cool concept of U-Form. This is really cool stuff and has helped me the most in area of corporate dashboards and business intelligence applications that pull information from both internal operations and from “scanning” or “sensing” external data sources.