p. 73: There is one major distinction between the databases that serve the bioinformatics community and molecular biologists [sic; actually, we ought to consider taxonomy as maybe the type specimen of bioinformatics!] and those that serve taxonomists, at least with respect to the taxonomic databases I have visited.

The major databases of nucleic acid sequence, protein sequence, and protein structure are truly open sources.  The international nucleic acid sequence data library, for example, is available to anyone to download onto their own machine without conditions, let or hindrance....

The advantage of this open policy is inestimable. ... No database can claim to be "in the public domain" unless its entire contents are available as ASCII text or database table dumps (from an FTP site).  There are many ways of making data truly available to the public without losing control over it (see, for example ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/variantdbs/hgbase/LICENSE).

Were the taxonomic community to embrace this concept, then the absolute chaos, that, to an outsider, now seems to exist in that field, might be improved.