NY MTA Realizing That Having People Create Apps For You Isn't Such A Bad Thing
from the about-time dept
Like many other transit authorities, NY's MTA took a ridiculous stance that it owned train scheduling time, and threatened independent developers, demanding large licensing fees for creating iPhone or web apps. This has never made any sense to me. Even if those transit authorities have licensed the data in the past, you can't copyright facts and (much more importantly) the goal of any transit authority should be to get more people comfortable with using public transit -- and if an independent developer is willing to create a useful app that does that for free, it should be celebrated, not met with a cease-and-desist. It looks like some at the MTA are finally realizing this, as they're backing off some of their earlier threats, and letting some apps move forward (thanks ADM for sending in the link). They don't have an official policy on this yet, but do admit that it makes sense to "evolve" to keep up with what people are doing. Later in the article, they basically admit they never really thought about this, and the whole idea that someone else might make an app for them seemed foreign, and thus, they reacted poorly to it. Either way, it's good to see them come around to realizing that opening up data makes a lot of sense.
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Filed Under: copyright, data, facts, public transportation, trains
Companies: mta
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Someone probably figured out what it would cost them.
Someone at the MTA probably sat down and figured out what it would cost them to produce and maintain their own app, and then quickly realized how attractive it was to get the work done for free. A large system could expect several people to develop the app, and the best one will probably win out.
I hope they don't mess it up with their policies now. A policy that said there must be a disclaimer about the MTA not being responsible for the app would be reasonable. I hope they don't decide that people should not be allowed to make money on their work and prohibit things like ads. The big question is whether they will permit any type of twitter-like or blog-like activities with the apps that might be critical of the MTA.
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governments [shakes head]
- you'd be threatening some slow-moving political appointee's job.. not acceptable.
- you'd be stuck in endless meetings (unpaid) while they argue for months about how to do it.
- control. they don't want to cede it, as you said.
- because it has to be decided by committee and meet regulations (real or imagined), they'd shoot down every idea you had until you'd end up doing 10% of what you proposed. for very, very little money.
no wonder nothing ever gets done.
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One would think...
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