Wikipedia Founder: Free Knowledge requires Free Software and Free File Formats
jimmywales.com
jimmywales.com
The problem going forward is that it's happening again - companies that want customer lock in are totally willing to build new formats only they understand. I think this is going to hit us hard in the medical sector, which not only has a lot of proprietary, non-conforming implementations of standards that were designed by committee, but a huge amount of legacy data and equipment that people are used to using.
A local hospital, for example, just jumped to a windows only GUI interface with 2 different web interfaces, all of which are broken on non IE platform. And it's considers "state of the art" and "best of breed".
Leeches are free medicine, as opposed to today's as-closed-as-it-gets med/pharma industry. They are still in use in official medicine, not only in the form of synthetic blood anticoagulant hirudin.
There's quite little information on hirudotherapy on Wikipedia, no mention of the range of beneficial substances leches' saliva contains (other than hirudin) and no mention of e.g. benefits of iron depletion through bloodletting.
This might be considered controversial medicine, but dismissing medicinal use of leeches sounds a bit off to me.
But I might be totally wrong, I am part of the Wikipedia generation too after all :)
Good policy.
Let us transcend our great poverty of understanding.