[danso]

Serious question: what do you think would be the better alternative? Especially when factoring in ease-of-upkeep (for the creator), convenient and familiar interface for the majority of users, Google's generally good uptime and server performance, and that a Google Sheet set to public access is not closed by a reasonable definition of that word.

I was going to quip about how I am annoyed that Google removed download-as-a-CSV as a URL endpoint, but it appears I misheard about this because /export?format=csv still turns the Google Sheet URL into a direct download link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4jucl...

[3JPLW]

I personally didn't find it easy to consume, and others here didn't either (see the confusion about what it is, asking for context, etc). The links aren't clickable, there are multiple newline-separated links in a single cell, etc.

I'm not just objecting to the use of Google; part of an open dataset is its ease of use.

As for alternatives, I agree, it's hard to rival Google Sheets in terms of the creator's time. But again, for someone invested in curating open datasets, I'd hope for a bit of time invested in curating their own data — even if it remains within Google sheets.