For the last two years Google, which hasn't exactly been in a position to lecture anybody about the evils of lock-in, has been harboring a small team of counterculture engineers in Chicago that style themselves the Data Liberation Front quietly working to cut the shackles that condemn captive users to remaining customers of Google services because their data is held hostage.

After apparently liberating roughly half of Google's products including Blogger, Google's free blogging platform and Gmail and developer tools such as App Engine they went public Monday saying that they mean to give all Google products simple built-in import and export functionality and make it easy - and free - for users to pack up their data and skip off to somebody else's rival widgetry.

Google Sites and Google Docs are on the batch export to-do list.

The Front says that closed isn't inherently bad, it's just lazy. "When your users are locked in," its blog says, "there's a strong temptation to be complacent and focus less on making your product better."

"Many web services make it difficult to leave their services - you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops - for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once. We believe that users - not products - own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We'd rather have loyal users who use Google products because they're innovative - not because they lock users in. You can think of this as a long-term strategy to retain loyal users, rather than the short-term strategy of making it hard for people to leave."

The promise of data portability will obviously help entice more people to adopt Google's cloud widgetry.

Dataliberation Org is collecting liberation suggestions at its Moderator page. And it's on Twitter @ dataliberation.