James Governor left a comment on a previous post where he said to be an open source company “you need to make contributions.” I like this definition as it is simple and does not prescribe a specific business model.  That is, you need not sell software to be considered open source but you do need to give back.

Google just donated a corpus of one trillion words to anyone who wants it. I wonder if this will become the new open source model for web sites. After all creating a new fancy algorithm is one thing, having the right data to test it on — priceless.

Of course, leave it to AOL to ruin everything by giving away personal data. This event has probably set back the whole idea of free data at least 10 years.