ISeveral people have commented on that particular blog post publicly, and hopefully are shoving it in the right direction.
I don't see any comments on it - where is this discussion taking place?
I must say I think the author is being a bit disingenuous in a couple of ways:
Firstly by completely failing to mention Network Rail's real time data feeds. The way it is written implies that Darwin is the only option for getting access to real time train movement data. Technically it is correct to say it is currently the only public
API for real time running data, but for a balanced view it really should mention that all the
data is available for free from Network Rail. The difference is that Network Rail don't provide an API; they just provide the raw data, and all the hard work of mashing this up with schedule data into a nice usable interface is left for you to do yourself. ATOC have access to more or less the same raw data, and they have invested a lot of money in the Darwin system in order to provide a usable API for feeding passenger information systems, real-time departure boards etc.
Secondly, I think the author is being disingenuous by constantly referring to ATOC as "owning" Darwin. In my mind anyway this suggests it is perhaps some legacy computer system they have inherited, or otherwise become custodians of by chance, and are exploiting this position in an unfairly competitive manner. Whereas in reality (anybody who knows anything in more detail about this please correct me) they have invested huge sums in creating this system themselves in order to tie together a lot of data from disparate sources into a unified interface, and any reasonable person would consider them entitled to reap the reward of that investment by extracting license fees for its use.
Can anybody help inform the debate by letting us know what Darwin has that the Network Rail datafeeds don't? I believe there is perhaps some extra information manually fed into it directly from TOC control rooms?
