This link has been bookmarked by 15 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Mar 2007, by eyal matsliah.
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11 Oct 11
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21 Aug 11
Vernon FowlerEver since the birth of the free software movement, its defenders have struggled to explain just what "free software" is. If it is free, how do coders eat? And how do businesses that support the software – IBM, Hewlett-Packard – make any money from it?
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You can charge whatever you want for free software. But what you can't do is lock up the knowledge that makes it run. Others must be allowed to learn from and tinker with it. No one is permitted a monopoly on the teaching that stands behind it.
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What makes Free Beer free is the same thing that makes free software free: Its recipe is open and licensed freely.
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the brewery is keeping the knowledge free for everyone
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Indeed, we're seeing an explosion of open source businesses.
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All of these businesses build upon the value created by their users, while keeping that value free for others to build upon as well.
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we've entered the land of the long tail – where digital technology supports a massively more diverse range of products and models for production – then, as he puts it, making the consumer a producer is an excellent way to move a business up the long tail. In this model, free knowledge can drive a particular kind of free market – at least a kind that seems to flourish in a digital world.
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what helps innovation flourish. It's not any magic word, like free or open. It is instead a practice that encourages the widest range of innovators. Superflex has inspired this practice with beer. And perhaps with much more as well.
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11 Mar 07
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"Think free," the movement's founder, Richard Stallman puts it, "as in free speech, not free beer." You can charge whatever you want for free software. But what you can't do is lock up the knowledge that makes it run. Others must be allowed to learn from and tinker with it. No one is permitted a monopoly on the teaching that stands behind it.
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The short list of these books is led by MIT professor Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation.
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Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks places this commercial practice in a larger and perhaps more significant social context: Although peer production is profitable for business, writes Benkler, "we are in the midst of a quite basic transformation in how we perceive the world around us and how we act, alone and in concert with others."
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And a few of those may then think a bit more about what helps innovation flourish. It's not any magic word, like free or open. It is instead a practice that encourages the widest range of innovators. Superflex has inspired this practice with beer. And perhaps with much more as well.
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