When The Norwegian Meteorological Institute, together with The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, launched the new weather service yr.no in 2007, it quickly became one of the most popular websites in Norway. Five years later, statistics show that the majority of the Norwegian population are frequent users of yr.no.

Besides covering the need for weather information for end users, with the making of yr.no a revolution took place: The institute decided to stop selling weather information that was produced by the core service. Hence, all data and products that you can see on yr.no as numbers, figures and animations are available as open data. The consequence was that we gave up a marginal income in favour for the society at large.

In the context of empowering enterprises which are oriented towards new and innovative technologies, we believe a new attitude of openness within the public sector is one important source we have to explore and exploit. In order to do so, there is a need of a change in attitude in the governmental institutions and agencies on practicing openness as more than obeying the legal duty of transparency. The new openness is about making the results of our work available to the public, the ones that funds our service. Our work should be available for re-use with no restrictions, using standardised licenses. We believe that allowing re-users to have free access to data will have a huge potential to become an important contribution to foster innovation and value creation in the business sector.