Will Geo Data Get Inspired and Go Open?

According to this post by Rufus Pollock, the INSPIRE proposal, the European Commission Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastucture, just might make European geo-spatial data available to the public for free.

I'm sure there's plenty of scope for things to go pear-shaped, and this isn't an area I know anything about, so I've no idea what the dynamics are. But at least there's hope. The place to find out whether that hope is realised or crushed is Public Geo Data. (Via Open Access News.)