Since 2010, geospatial data of Swiss Gov. agencies can be viewed and accessed over geo.admin. ch in a fast, free and state of the art manner. Over 200 datasets are accessed by up to 50’000 users daily. To initialize a spatial data infrastructure, key constraints are data management methodologies: establishment of uniform standards for data capture and dissemination as well as in the modeling and archiving of data and metadata. Those are the fundamentals for interdisciplinary and international collaboration. After 3 years of operation, lessons learned cover Open Source Software: no license cost, short time to market, scalable, innovative, user driven, and cost /benefit effective. Open Standards: interoperability with existing and future solutions guaranteed. Open Access: Access is where all content (data) is going. Where ever possible data, data services and application programming interface including sources were made public available – open government data portal opendata.admin.ch. In the talk we will leverage why open data & code is crucial to science. Technology has changed the nature of experimentation, data, and communication. On the other hand we will show how to deal with the main barrier: Copyright of Gov. data and data generated by scientist.