“The non-commercial clause that has governed use and re-use of the Museum’s metadata is rooted in the belief that non-profit academic charities should enable free use only for non-profit purposes. But in the digital age, with evidence that use and re-use can increase knowledge when it is openly linked across the entire web, the new view is that data funded by the taxpayer should have the broadest possible distribution.”

— From The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: A business model perspective on open metadata (PDF), Europeana, 2011. (quote is from a case study about the British Museum; an interview with Dominic Oldman, page 24)