InfoWorld’s Bill Snyder has a very interesting article about open source “leeching,” and the apparent beginnings of some grumbling in the bleeding-edge world. I say it’s interesting because of what I perceive to be major fissures in our new freeconomy. (I didn’t make up the term; it’s been applied to a lot of things…) In February of last year, before the economy went legs-up, Wired had a cover article called “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business.” That didn’t seem like a really cool idea to me at the time, and I still feel that way. This is because, at some point, I think people want to be rewarded for their information or innovation.
But that doesn’t seem to be the prevailing ethos among certain tech blogs. Take Gizmodo, for example, which called Psion, who had apparently challenged Intel on the use of mark “netbook” because Psion had registered it with the USPTO long ago, “dickish.” (Ars Technica has a more even-handed analysis of the litigation. (Ars’ search function is broken right now, so this is the Yahoo! approximation.)) The upshot is pretty clear: free is awesome, and IP is bad. But how long is that sustainable? (And it bears mentioning that Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, publishes under a Creative Commons License, but it has registered the names of its sites with the USPTO, and even the CCL has restrictions on how its work can be used.)
I think the economics of free are going to be challenging our society for a while, and I can’t end this post without acknowledging the fact that I’m writing this blog on a free wi-fi connection, using a free blog service (WordPress), giving away information for free, and making use of information that I was able to access for free.
