Information Wants to be Valuable
I read an article by Tim O’Reilly who has some interesting thoughts about the information age and publishing books on free/libre, open-source software.
He says that Larry Wall (father of Perl) has something in common with Bill Gates (father of Microsoft). They both want their software to be valuable. But one releases the software for free and the other restricts access to it to create value.
I think it’s worth making the point that open-source software is also valuable because it’s good software, not just because it’s usually cheap. If Perl were buggy, unstable, and lacked useful features, nobody would use.
Another point is that open-source software does not necessarily come without a price! It just means that when you obtain the software, you are entitled to the source code as well — and most importantly — you are given the right to modify and distribute changes. But to obtain the software, you could have very likely paid for it (like ActiveState Perl).
Information wants to be free because the Internet makes it so cheap to distribute, copy, and modify. Information wants to be expensive because the right information at the right time is valuable to the recipient. Like so many things in nature, information is a dichotomy. The tension between the two divisions has lead to copyright and intellectual property laws that are endlessly debated.
The tipping point is when information costs so little that you won’t bother obtaining it through other (dishonest) means. Some information will always be quite valuable, such as software that runs businesses. The cost of other information will eventually be driven down by this cheap distribution system we call the Internet. Now, if someone would just get a micro-payments scheme working and adopted …