#opengovernment

"When Steven Peterson created Routesy, an iPhone app that lets riders see Muni arrival times, the last thing he expected was to hear was that Muni's real-time arrival times were actually the property of a private company located in the East Bay. But that's exactly what happened, when Alex Orloff, COO of a company calling itself NextBus Information Systems, contacted him in August, 2008, demanding a "straight revenue split" or a "data licensing agreement" from Peterson. "

"Sorry I ever brought it up, sorry for any hurt feelings. It was wrong of me to think that I could make any progress without the support of the organization providing the data, and wrong of me to press on regardless of the cost. Someone else will have to care - I give up. It's just not worth it and it's bad for my health to care and to spend too much time around parking structure fumes."

"So if I ask for that page of numbers as the spreadsheet it was originally, and a public records officer for a public body gives it to me as a bitmap, I'm going to ask again and keep asking publicly and perhaps uncomfortably until we both understand that this is a routine request and that compliance with routine requests is much easier than making everything an exception - because maybe, just maybe, I can replace that FOIA letter with a tiny shell script and we can just go about our business."