The End of Free 348
The Atlantic has up an insightful piece from its print edition called Closing the Digital Frontier. Michael Hirschorn takes readers through a jaundiced version of the familiar story of the rise and dominance of the "Information wants to be free" meme, then claims that the era of freedom is now over. "...the phrase Information wants to be free... became perhaps the most powerful meme of the past quarter century; so powerful, in fact, that multibillion-dollar corporations destroyed their own businesses at its altar. ... But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. ... It’s far from a given that this shift will generate the kinds of revenue media companies are used to: for under-30s whelped on free content, the prospect of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars yearly for print, audio, and video (on expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month) is not going to be an easy sell. Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps. There’s too much potential upside."
No uptake from young people? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps. There’s too much potential upside."
Eh? I thought the entire drive behind the iphone and the appstore is young people... without them apple wouldnt be making money hand over fist, and not everyone and their grandma would be building apps to 'get rich quick'TM
If young people didnt care about apps, no one would make them, since there wouldnt be any benefit to doing so at all.
Search is still relevant... (Score:5, Insightful)
Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.
I use my iPhone primarily for searching Google -- that's probably what I most use it for. If I'm watching a movie, reading a book, talking to someone, and I want to know some bit of information about the topic, I Google it on my phone and then view the relevant content in the browser. Of course, there is an app for that, but why would I want to install a dozen different applications (IMDB, Wikipedia etc.) when I can Google it and get the results on one page. Google is pretty good at providing what I need. I have no doubt, however, that other people use these individual apps to find the information they need. I guess it's a matter of preference.
The Internet as a business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How Quickly They Forget (Score:2, Insightful)
On the contrary, I quite clearly remember paying $20/month for unlimited dialup in the mid 90s. That was AT&T and Earthlink. I believe AOL was about the same.
Also, $30 may be your monthly data charge, but AT&T really forces you to pay something like $60/month as a minimum for iPhone service. That's far from a trivial cost for the vast majority of people.
The market disagrees (Score:5, Insightful)
Every single media provider who started to charge for content has lost out. New York Times is a great example. They've had to reduce prices again and again and again and still have trouble.
The second a news story is out, someone reproduces it. It's no longer about content ownership, it's who can get it out, correct and in a format people like FIRST.
Look at music... who won that one? Itunes. They got it out in a method and format faster and better than anyone. Now... admittedly there might have been better services but they didn't offer the library that itunes can. (I hate itunes before anyone passes judgment).
What the market is proving is that people have a threshold for payment on content. The majority of us it's around $10 for movies (that's when sales peak in numbers other than first release) on DVD's, for music it's around $15 for a full CD, 75 to 99 cents for an individual song... and so on. News media, it's 0. There are a small few of us that then replicate this news (to the media companies horror) to the wide audiences. The author things this will stop... and of course has no true understanding of the market.
Information is easier to share than at any other point in history. News is replicated and spread in seconds now, and people, not just the young kids, are used to it for FREE. The only way this "may" be possible is if every single news media group put up walls at the same time... AND noone found a way to bypass this. It's just not feasible.
The most impact this can possible have is a lag in news release in the hours. It's like the RIAA... it's an antiquated business model that doesn't work anymore. The times have changed so that content en masse is no longer valuable, just the content itself. Good news, strong stories... well written... that's what matters now.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Confusing apps and network, with content (Score:5, Insightful)
The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold
The article confuses apps, Internet connections, with paying for media. On the desktop, it's long been the case that people pay for software (despite the useful presence of free software). And people pay for their Internet connection.
Similarly with phones - people pay for applications, they pay for their connection.
And the problem on the desktop isn't that people are unwilling to pay for media, it's that it often isn't available. Can I get TV on demand online for a charge? Not as far as I know in the UK. So I've no doubt that people will pay money for an app that gives them TV on a phone, but they would do so on the desktop too.
Where pay-for media is struggling is news. Are people more like to pay to read a newspaper on their 5800 than on their Intel Windows PC?
They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year
Ah yes, a multitude of computing devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets, PMPs, phones), but let's give the obligitary product placement to the Ipad. Do we really think that most people will be walking around with an Ipad? And are netbook users etc going to start paying for content?
And with Apple in the driver's seat
Hah. Thankfully - given the article's valid concerns about their closed policy - this isn't remotely true when we look in terms of things like market share. Though no doubt I predict plenty of replies arguing until they're blue in the face that they are (or redefining market share to use some arbitrary criteria where they are first).
Twitter, like other recent-vintage social networks, is barely bothering with its Web site; its smart-phone app is more fully featured. The independent TweetDeck, which collates feeds across multiple social networks, is not browser-based.
This sort of thing is hardly new, nor necessarily a bad thing. Years ago, people used Usenet clients. Many people still use email clients. Sites like LiveJournal have downloadable clients for desktop platforms. It goes without saying that the software versions are more featured - otherwise what would be the point of them. We didn't have hip names for them like "apps", but it's the same thing, long before people started using their phones.
But again, the article is conflating different issues - the technology (website versus software) with the idea of free content. Is anyone going to pay to read Twitter feeds, despite its use of apps?
Good news (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope this really is the case. The WWW will be much better off if all the herdable bunch continue their slow, guided path into app-land and let the west return to the wild.
Strawman based on bastardized belief system (Score:5, Insightful)
If you go back to the actual quote,
http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html [rogerclarke.com]
cue twenty-five years later, the first part of the quote being widely forgotten, and an army of too-smart-for-you opionators attacking their own mis-quote using the original quote's argument as their justification for why it is wrong.
It really makes you wonder what the non-populistized seventeen people later word of mouth versions of the original western religious texts were actually trying to say..
It's just (Score:5, Insightful)
That a lot of "Free" stuff also turns out to be crap. Therefore the hidden cost is the time it takes in sorting out the good free stuff from the crap. With payware certain standards are expected - or even enforced by third parties (ie an app store). In cases where some crapware does find its way into that third party store, usually there is someone to complain to and the crapware is removed quickly.
It's the old argument of "I can't be bothered to do it myself". It's why we have politicians. It's why we have religions and "gods". Because we prefer to have 'someone else' to delegate certain fears and worries to (even if that 'someone else' turns out to be corrupt in the case of politicians and clerics, or even non-existent in the case of gods). Humans are funny that way.
Re:The Internet as a business (Score:4, Insightful)
Just another face of Eternal September.
Gold Rush (Score:2, Insightful)
(Snark)
"Hai Apple. Nice job getting Shareware to actually work! You earned your $."
(/Snark)
They got all my respect for doing business right. Everyone, take your $200 and buy your favorite apps. (Waits)
Okay, everyone back? Everyone got your nice little 50 apps at $4 each? Good. Where were we ... Oh yes, the web. Watch what happens when 50% of companies stop maintaining the back end of their apps. We'll see 12 lawsuits from critical cases, and then it will all shake out into the top 100 apps that everyone will want, and we'll go back to *basic* info wanting to be free.
Re:How Quickly They Forget (Score:5, Insightful)
I quite clearly remember paying $20/month for unlimited dialup in the mid 90s
With inflation, $20 in 1995 would be around $28 today, which is comparable to the $30 a month data charge for a smartphone. And of course, even today's wireless access is generally faster than dialup was in the mid 1990's.
Also, $30 may be your monthly data charge, but AT&T really forces you to pay something like $60/month as a minimum for iPhone service. That's far from a trivial cost for the vast majority of people.
Yes. And in the mid 1990's, you had to have telephone service in order to take advantage of dialup internet providers like AOL. That would have run you at least $20 a month in most markets. Then, if you made a standard amount of long distance calls (including "local" long distance in most large metro areas), you were looking at at least another $20 a month in LD charges. That's $40 for your phone, or about $55 in 2010 money. At $60 a month your cell phone provides you with hundreds of minutes of free long distance calling (unlimited in the late evenings and on weekends) in addition to the convenience of wireless. Not bad for about five extra dollars a month.
The author is a lobbyist (Score:1, Insightful)
He is preping the audience to expect this and so to not be upset when it arrives.
thats why he is like essentially a lobbyist but is lobbying the public to say "hey this is normal so just except it and do it".
This is why his logic path is not really logical because he needs to bend a few times to make it all match up with his intention which is to convince readers that its normal and logical that the price should go up.
Its a common technique, like a self fulfilling prophecy
There's too much potential upside. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently, the "consumers" are like grass: just an infinite [1] supply of fodder to be exploited, with all the decisions being made for us up the food chain.
[1] I live in the West, and see on a regular basis how infinite that "sea of grass" really wasn't.
Re:How Quickly They Forget (Score:5, Insightful)
Wireless internet access rates are slowly creeping upward. I can only speak to T-mobile as an example, but my blackberry plan was $20/mo. The switch to G1 added $5/mo as my choices were $25/mo without texting or $35/mo with, but that plan is shared with a family plan for voice minutes. Fast forward one year and the carrier discounted Nexus requires an individual plan that totals $70/mo. I paid full price on my Nexus One just to keep my old, cheaper plan. My friend who just bought a Sprint EVO found Sprint charges $29.99/mo for data, but require a separate tethering up-charge to boot, so Sprint is even more expensive than T-Mobile.
Don't get me wrong - the utility of these phone is such that you are practically carrying a laptop around, but the American data plans are so expensive I'm seriously considering the move from early adopter (owner of a development G1) back to prepaid dumb phone after years of carrying smart phones. A $20 phone with a $100/1000 minute prepaid sim is starting to look pretty good next to a $120/mo cell phone bill.
More corporate BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I havent RTFA yet, and sometimes the summaries don't accurately reflact their FAs. But from the summary, TFA seems particularly clueless. First, "Information wants to be free" is IMO clueless in itself. Information doesn't want to be free any more than your doorknob wants to be free. You could as easily say "Information wants to be paid for". But when information isn't free, neither are you.
Second, "The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway" is just as clueless. The internet is the internet, whether you're accessing it from your phone or your PC. Few have 4G smartphones. Mine isn't 4G, but it will access the internet, and guess what? There are tons of free apps for it. And an iPhone is 4G, but 4G isn't iPhone any more than a four legged animal is a dog. Apple has always been a walled garden, and that's how Apple customers like it. But most of us aren't Apple customers.
It's far from a given that this shift will generate the kinds of revenue media companies are used to
Who gives two shits whether or not media companies get revenue? I don't, and neither should anyone not invested in media company stock. I'm sick of the corporate whores and the corporate media they own turning the world into a bunch of money worshiping greedheads who believe "free=worthless". The best things in life are free: Sunsets, air, rain, FOSS, indie music, walking hand in hand with your S.O., playing catch with your grandchild, etc. Nothing you can buy holds a candle to any of these. Windows is far inferior to Linux, which isn't only free as in beer but gives one true computing freedom.
And I find it fascinating that the corporate media usually refuses to even mention FOSS. We nerds are the only ones who know about Linux; when I mention to normal people that they can replace Windows with an OS that costs nothing and is free from viruses, and there is an office suite that is likewise free, and free media playes that are superior to WiMP, they're astounded.
Now to a response to your comment about "The only question now is who will own" the web, personally I think the question is ludicrously meaningless, not important. Nobody owns it, and nobody will. It's free.
I look forward to free internet access for all, free of corporate robber barons and gatekeeprs, a mesh network where everyone opens up access to everyone else. It's doable and should be done, and I think we here at slashdot are the ones to start it. As to "the government", which government? It's a world wide web, not an American corporate web.
Re:Confusing apps and network, with content (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh?
I don't really care whether it's LiveJournal or Livejournal; IPhone or Iphone. Where did I suggest that Livejournal was incorrect, or IPhone was incorrect?
If you mean I'm not writing "iPhone", I fail to see what that's got to do with LiveJournal, since I didn't write "liveJournal" (or "lIvejournal"). If I was in the business of writing trademarks, it would be "LiVEJOURNAL", by the way.
I apologise if everything I write doesn't seem completely consistent to you, I'll have to try better next time. I'm not the one going around moaning at how other people write, however.
(with your lame, intentional mistyping)
It's called English. "iPad" is the stylised trademark, which I don't write, anymore than you don't write "Toys R Us" with a backwards R; just as no one writes "Intel" or "Adidas" with a lower case capital, and just as you don't sing "ding-dong-ding-dong" when you write Intel.
All you're missing is a well-rounded, impotent M$
Why would I write "M$"? What have Microsoft got to do with anything here?
the Circle of Troll
If you're going to accuse me of inconsistency, shouldn't that be "cIrcle of tRoll", if you love capitalising second letters but not the first so much?
Re:How Quickly They Forget (Score:3, Insightful)
> Wait, $30 a month for Internet service on a $300 phone or $600 tablet? Yeah, that's real steep, as opposed to, say, $30 a month for AOL on a $1,500 Windows 95 PC a decade or so ago.
Regardless of what my Internet service costs per month, it pays for all of the devices connected to my network.
It doesn't require a separate fee for my Wii, for my 3 media PCs, for my Linux PCs, for my Macs, for the iphones or for the iPad.
Yes. Compared to that, paying $30 per month for a SINGLE device is infact high way robbery.
Those stupid little fees add up after awhile. If you can add, you can certainly pick up on this fact. Admittedly, that's a bit of a stretch for some "consumers".
The level of service you get for $30 per month on an iPhone or iPad also sucks. Sure it's mobile but it's slow and unreliable.
The Internet as mass appetites (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to know why the "Information wants to be free" attitude is dying, it is because the Internet has been taken over by business interests; the original network of academics and hackers is just a tiny fraction of what the Internet has now become.
If you want to know why that happened, look at the post-1996 audience for the internet: people who would otherwise be watching television.
They're looking for entertainment and socialization, not "information" in the colloquial sense of knowledge-bearing data.
Re:I Disagree with Some Parts of This Article (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't disagree. I've been saying for a couple days now that Free TV is dying, to be replaced by a pay-to-see model. And now this guy comes out with this:
>>>from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995.
>>>
The corporations are leading us down a path towards $1000-to-2000 per year bills just so we can see the latest episode of Stargate, or hear the news, or get a warning about severe weather. What was once free, they are locking-up behind paywalls and ye are cheering it along as technological "advancement" when it's actually the opposite.
Re:Strawman based on bastardized belief system (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's just (Score:3, Insightful)
> With payware certain standards are expected
That is a nice bit of delusion.
It is entirely bogus of course.
There is plenty of total dreck in payware software. There's plenty of expensive software that makes you want to delete
it and install something Free instead. Microsoft was always great at making stuff like that. Apple even manages to do
that too. Their "curation" of the app store also doesn't help curb the desire for better solutions and better products
whether they're free or not.
The idea that "payware is better" is just post factum argumentation by the swindled used to soothe their sorry egos.
You got taken and you don't want to admit it. You need to justify some product choice that cost more than it really needed to.
You weren't taken. You're just just vulnerable to flim flam. "it really is better"
The existence of free things does not alter the need to pay attention to what you "buy". Paying for something doesn't magically allow you to be blissfully ignorant of what you are buying our what your actual requirements are.
Re:I Disagree with Some Parts of This Article (Score:5, Insightful)
Free TV is not dead. Get a $20 antenna, and you can get nice 1920x1080 HD TV off the air for *gasp* free.
People who don;t remember history are doomed to repeat it.
Back in the previous century, people were claiming that the Internet would have to go to a paid-content model because there was no way that it could remain free. It's still mostly free, because any time that someone tries to erect a pay-wall, someone else says "here's my chance to take away their customers."
What would happen tomorrow if 99% of all web sites went to a paywall? The 1% that didn't would replace them as THE top sites within a day.
It's the same thing with anything else, including mobile apps. The free ones are often better than the paid ones, and the price is right.
The article is wishful thinking ... just like Kevin McBride, when he says [slushdot.com]
ChinAmerica - part 2
Guess who now has the second-most IP addresses in the world? China. And they have more people with cell phones than the entire US population - and that number is increasing. Put up too many pay-walls, and China and India, which together have more than 1/3 the worlds' population, will p0wn your ass!
Don't think it can happen? GM already sells more cars in China than in the US.
Re:I Disagree with Some Parts of This Article (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>Free TV is not dead. Get a $20 antenna, and you can get nice 1920x1080 HD TV off the air for *gasp* free.
(1) I said "dying" not dead. (2) You've not heard the news? FCC's Broadband Plan will sell off the remaining TV channels to ATT, Verizon, and other cellular companies, and Obama has announced he fully supports the plan and wants to implement it ASAP. (3) No free TV won't be completely dead, but with only 5-6 channels left per city it might as well will be.
.
>>>What would happen tomorrow if 99% of all web sites went to a paywall?
You are correct in your previous analysis, but they aren't erecting the paywall at the website because they know it would fail. They are erecting it at your home by basically forcing you to subscribe to ATT/comcast/whoever to get your television or news or internet. The free services are slowly but surely getting destroyed by the FCC and the corporations it serves.
I fully expect that by 2020 I'll either have a ~$100/month bill to see videos, or else have no access to them. It's ridiculous.
Re:I Disagree with Some Parts of This Article (Score:3, Insightful)
"In a smart essay in the journal Fast Capitalism in 2005, Jack Shuler shows how similar the rhetoric of the 1990s digital frontier was to that of the 19th-century frontier era."
That may be true. But there is an important difference the article does not see. The 19th-century frontier may have "seemed" infinite, but the information space (or noosphere [wikipedia.org]) is for all practical purposes infinite.
What many corporations try to do is block the access to that infinite space, and make us forget that it exists. And make us pay to access their walled-in spaces.
They might still succeed, but only through "legal" trickery, not because of any natural limitation, such as the large but finite area or the "west".
Re:How Quickly They Forget (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>With inflation, $20 in 1995 would be around $28 today, which is comparable to the $30 a month data charge for a smartphone.
Instead of comparing the present to the ancient technological past when 28k was considered "fast" and a ~0.1 gigahertz processor was standard, how about comparing the present to the present?
$50 for cellular internet; capped at a mere 5-10 gigabytes
$15-20 for DSL with no cap (or cable with 250GB cap)
$7 for dialup with no cap
$0 for over-the-air television (6000 gigabytes per channel)
the rules of economics still applies (Score:3, Insightful)
if i stand in the middle of the desert with bottles of water for $100 each, i will have a profitable business
but if i stand in front of a sparkling clean fresh water lake and try to sell bottles of water for $.10 each, i will be out of business
when i can point and click and share thousands of files effortlessly and freely with any teenager from gdansk to johannesburg, i really don't know how or why someone is supposed to force me to pay for that under a dead distribution model and the laws that are made for that dead era
so its simple economics folks: infinite free supply means there is no price point. the internet is an unlimited resource, unless they fundamentally break the internet inexorably (and thereby destroy that which makes the internet attratice to anyone)
Re:How Quickly They Forget (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>It doesn't require a separate fee for my Wii, for my 3 media PCs, for my Linux PCs, for my Macs, for the iphones or for the iPad.
Yeah until they put a 5 GB cap on your service, and suddenly you start getting charged overage fees for all those devices exceeding the limit.
Vulture capitalists wanna get paid... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More corporate BS (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the right context is "information wants to be free" like "water wants to flow downhill". Sure, you can limit water's progress by building a dam, just like you can encrypt data or otherwise limit the access to information; but in the internet world, information tends to become free (pirates, cracking, etc). In that sense, information is more slippery than water, particularly on general purpose computers, but it is possible to limit it.
Re:More corporate BS (Score:3, Insightful)
You're mostly spot on. "information wants to be free" has always been idiotic without concise definitions of "information" and "free".
You mean "precise"? Either way, by using the word "wants" (given that information doesn't literally "want" anything) they saying it letting you know that it's a generalization. Like "nature abhors a vacuum." That doesn't mean that there are no vacuums, but it's just describing a trend.
So does "information wants to be free" mean? As I see it, what's being pointed out is that (a) unlike physical objects, information is easy to replicate and share; and (b) people like to share information. It's hard to keep secrets because people like to gossip and people love a scandal. It's hard to keep an idea from spreading because, if it's compelling, people will spread it. And it only has to get out once. If the information is leaked at all, it's so easy to replicate and spread that it will get out.
And now that a song or movie are even easier to replicate than ideas, the same thing now applies to copyrighted materials. All you need is to have one unprotected copy leaked, and it will tend to get spread around. It can be very difficult to stop once it starts spreading.
Re:More corporate BS (Score:3, Insightful)
In a word: No.
Information does not want to be liberated and does not need to be liberated. It simply becomes free. The saying expresses the natural tendency of (useful) information to become known to more people. It's as if information had a mind of its own and actively worked on becoming free.
More on topic: There won't be an end to free and information still "wants to be free". The unwashed masses have never gotten the hang of free except where it was basically impossible to avoid, but that doesn't mean free information was scarce. The internet didn't become this great communication system because companies decided to give their stuff away. Companies decided to give their stuff away because they recognized that the internet was becoming this great communication medium. They didn't want to miss the opportunity, whatever that was going to be. Some companies may have sobered up and abandon the "free" model, but the internet still is this great communication medium just like it was before these companies joined the frenzy.
Anyone who thinks we'll ever pay for generic information again has yet to understand that the market is global, the "means of production" are dirt cheap and the product has zero marginal cost. I'll leave figuring out what that does to the price as an exercise to the reader.
Re:The Internet as a business (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to know why the "Information wants to be free" attitude is dying, it is because the Internet has been taken over by business interests
Not really. Facebook embodies the spirit of "information wants to be free". It is easier now to come by all sorts of personal data about people you've never met than ever before.
App competition wants information to be free (Score:3, Insightful)
The fight is manifested in "protocols want to be open" and a fear of free markets arising in implementations, because open protocols require "free" information. If the information is locked down, then there have to be secrets (or laws) that prevent accessing it, and therefore the protocol can't be open, so there's a limitation on implementations.
The openness of SMTP+POP/IMAP is why there was diversity in email clients. The openness of NNTP is why the mediocre discussion software 20 years ago was better than today's very best web forums. (And yes, there was web browser competition too, though some mistakenly people think it was all just Netscape vs MS. But the web case is complicated anyway, because websites blur the line between apps and dead content.)
That was the real "Digital Frontier" -- where many implementations of a protocol compete to do it best, leading to maximum user value. And you simply can't have that level of competition if the information itself is locked down. (e.g. compare watching a movie with mplayer to watching it with a licensed player from an electronics manufacturer who has to comply with DVDCCA's license or whatever. mplayer will let you skip the ads .. which means xine and vlc have to let you do it too, to stay relevant.) The freeness of the information is what allows commoditization of the protocols and formats, and variety of implementions. This is why Microsoft didn't want CIFS to be completely open (it opened a threat from Samba), didn't want people using web browsers to run applications that didn't require Windows, and so on. The threat that commoditization poses to those who want to prevent free markets, is what the "Halloween Memos" were about.
This caused an alliance between the "hippies" advocating free information for information's sake, and software user advocates who need information to be free, for software competition/evolution's sake. The author here thinks that the "hippie" ideal of information needing to be free might not last, but discounts the practical necessity of freedom -- unless you consider quality to be just another ideal which can be sacrificed.
Right now, the bar for quality and convenience on mobile devices is very low, so maybe giving up software quality isn't all that crazy. People are still willing to accept that you have to use this app to access this service; that if you want to buy music from the iTunes store, then you must use iTunes.
But how long will this last? I'm sure CompuServe and AOL had their healthy-looking days, but they're gone or irrelevant now.
Network effects might lock people into some particular services for a while, but I can't help but think that when people have access to a bunch of good XMPP apps, imagine what would happen to the idea of a Twitter app if they locked their service down so that there was only One implementation. That would be the end of them.
If the non-free content App takes off, it's not going replace the web, and even so, it's going to require sellers that can be happy in a tiny niche, looking at absolute sales figures from a small group of suckers, never ever taking a look at (and getting discouraged by) the big picture where they realize they have 0.01% marketshare. Personally, I think if people had that kind of guts, this would be The Year of Linux Gaming. ;-)
Re:More corporate BS (Score:3, Insightful)
I have always thought this statement "information wants to be free" is intended to be read just like "water wants to flow downhill". That "water wants to flow downhill" does NOT mean "you should not build dams", in fact it conversely means "if you don't want the water to flow downhill, you HAVE to build a dam, and it will be difficult because you are going against what the water naturally wants to do".
The fact that "information wants to be free" means that if some amazing DRM scheme is conconcted so that it is not possible for information to be copied in one direction without money flowing in the opposite direction, then that system will be extremely complex and huge, much like a dam.
Of course the morons in the media and the public will never figure out what the statement is supposed to mean. Pretty sad.
Compuserve, Source, Prodigy, AOL - where are they? (Score:3, Insightful)
Think of the past information walls that tried to charge for content:
Compuserve, Source, Prodigy, AOL, etc. Where are they now?
Why did they fail, but future walled providers will succeed?
I think that the advertisement supported content world is not dead and will not die for a very long time.
Re:More corporate BS (Score:3, Insightful)
You cannot (try to) demonstrate the superiority of Windows over any Linux distro by simply saying people won't be able to do exactly like in windows and get the same thing.
Of course they can't : IT'S A DIFFERENT OS !
If this was possible than the aforementioned Linux distribution would be
What's amazing (and terrible) about your argument is that you make all this innovation sound like a BAD thing...
Bottom line is : You can playback DVD on Ubuntu by installing ONE package that is proposed at the first start-up, and Rhythmbox is pretty similar to itunes and does a great job as an easy to use music player/library.
invisible bureaucracy of posers (Score:3, Insightful)
Normally I skim other comments before posting, but today I'm too busy.
This whole piece is ruined by the tactic of taking people's rhetoric too literally when mounting an attack on the underlying sentiment. In the heat of the battle, people say strange things. Ten years later, the discussion needs to rise above the original Battling Tops [wikipedia.org].
What was really at stake was the transaction floor. How valuable does information need to be *before* the constrictive apparatus of scarcity and profit kicks in? Given an exponentially falling cost of production and distribution for *most* information, the transaction floor ought to be pretty darn high.
The same thing applies to the patent system. The novelty floor is presently set an order of magnitude (or three) below where it needs to be. It's not hard to find examples of defensible patents, such as the original public key patent. Your average hacker wasn't going to invent public key exchange by accident. It took a fairly large conceptual leap to realize that this might be a possible goal. The blue LED is another one that took real dedication and effort where many had failed. If you take the current patent system and shrink it to 10% or 1% of the current patent issue rate (suitable for information that wants to be expensive) the system becomes such a small shadow of its present self, that maybe it's just easier to shut it down completely.
The problem is that a patent system dialed up to a respectable level of novelty will experience a dilution pressure. There will be a constant stream of people who would like to become millionaires by gaining possession of a simple idea such as one-click shopping. The anti-patent ideologues look at this and decide that cited the "slippery slope" argument is a way to force the system into a favorable polar outcome (no patents at all).
The problem there is that if you look at every social system in the world as a slippery slope and force every aspect of every system into a polar outcome to defeat the slippery slope, you end up with a crap system. Societies do not function integrating over a trust level of zero. The right solution is to design laws that bend but don't break. It's an engineering challenge. You can't build a democratic system without managing to solve this problem at least some of the time. If you believe it's completely unsolvable, then you don't functionally believe in democracy.
Where the transaction floor on "information wants to be expensive" needs to wind up is *above* what society can achieve for free by exploiting what Clay Shirkey calls the trillion hours per year cognitive surplus. People like to create, people like to collaborate, people like to share. If that's all it takes to create information of value, we don't need some corporation erecting a toll booth to dampen value creation.
There are lots of places where corporations have something unique to *add* to the picture. Open source hasn't come anywhere close to the refinement of OS X. You get that refinement with some DRM bitters on the side, but there it is. You have a choice. Apple gave my father the run around for the last several months on the iPhone reception issue. How do you hold a tiny phone in a giant mitt without touching the corners? Just because information wants to be expensive, doesn't mean you're always getting what you paid for.
The vigorous immune rejection at the Well was probably the same thing I feel. We need less companies out there looking around for something of value where they can plant a flag post and claim to be somehow essential to something that was already proceeding just fine. Corporate hustle can often bring an algorithm to market six months ahead of when the hackers would have got there anyway. How essential is that, in the long run? The accelerated solutions often prove to be annoyingly flimsy and riddled with security flaws, so it's arguable that the corporations win this race mostly by throwing more babie