In the last time many peoples ask in the blog comments, via mail, twitter or in personal discussions if we know other similar sites like codecheck or barcoo. Yes, we do and like their ideas. They are on the first glance similar to ProductTransparency. But the difference is that ProductTransparency aims to enable anybody to build a site like the once mentioned above without starting from scratch. Today the hard part of this is not the coding of the platform (due to many powerful web frameworks) but in this case it is the collection of data. ProductTransparency will use the Creative Commons Attribution License Creative Commons Zero (no copyright) which makes the data usable by anybody with nearly no legal restrictions. So the most important feature of ProductTransparency is its freedom of data. Only if an other provider/project would make it’s collection available under such an license ProductTransparency would maybe loose its necessity as the project was founded to fill this gap. The freedom aspect is also applied to the source code that might be generated – it will be released as open source. Additionally the development process will be open and community driven. Due to the free availability of data, code and ideas anybody who disagrees with ProductTransparency could start his or her own branch.

We still hope that ProductTransparency inspires existing efforts to free their data and code in a similar manner so that others can build on it. Our aim is to give consumers powerful tools for making their decisions and we hope that many other parties have the same aim.