In many ways, this joint statement just states the obvious. The data from the publicly funded Human Genome Project is and always has been intended to be free and publicly available.
Celera is a competing private effort. I really do not believe that governments intend to expropriate Celera's database, which has been privately funded. However, Celera has made extensive use of the public data to augment its own. (The nature of their sequencing methods require many overlapping fragments and redundant coverage to ensure accuracy.) One way to pressure Celera to make its data freely available would be to license the public data under something like the GPL - to demand that any database products that use it or derive from it are made freely available.
Regardless, even if Celera does not share, the HGP will catch up within a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Another bit of software you might have a look at is the NCBI datamodel and toolkit - see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/IEB
see http://bioinfo.mshri.on.ca/tkcourse for a tutorial
The toolkit is what much of the NCBI site is built on, including stuff like Genbank, BLAST and Cn3D.
In many ways, this joint statement just states the obvious. The data from the publicly funded Human Genome Project is and always has been intended to be free and publicly available.
Celera is a competing private effort. I really do not believe that governments intend to expropriate Celera's database, which has been privately funded. However, Celera has made extensive use of the public data to augment its own. (The nature of their sequencing methods require many overlapping fragments and redundant coverage to ensure accuracy.) One way to pressure Celera to make its data freely available would be to license the public data under something like the GPL - to demand that any database products that use it or derive from it are made freely available.
Regardless, even if Celera does not share, the HGP will catch up within a few years.