Henry Story, Danny Ayers and Shelley Powers wrote some astute criticisms of Tim O'Reilly's write-up on freebase.

Why do Tim O'Reilly, Cory Doctorow, and others continue to mis-cast a means to agree on how to communicate as a centrally-controlled system? I'm half-joking here, but is this all some sort of gesture to the postmodern concept that language itself is a form of oppression?

Less humorous is how the concepts of openness and control are thrown about as loaded language to promote a technology or service. To say that one technology is about control, while another is about openness is total bunk - what really matters are the intentions of the designers and the implementers, and, above all, the outcomes.