Last week, the European parliament and council of ministers worked out a compromise to the INSPIRE directive whose purpose is to harmonise spatial information in Europe. The directive had become the focus of an intense discussion about making public sector data freely available. It has been reported that the European Parliament supported mandating free data and the Council of Ministers was opposed. The compromise that was worked out appears to allow governments to charge for data, unlike the US and South Africa, for example, but with some restrictions, for example, arbitrary pricing.
This implies that the Ordnance Survey is probably not going to go out of business, as a result of INSPIRE Ed Parsons CTO of OS .
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