Open Content and Value Creation

Magnus Cedergren writes "Which are the driving forces behind the creation of Open Content? What value is created? That is the major questions I try to answer in my paper in the journal First Monday. I would like to thank all you people participating in my study in different ways."

Comments

Because it's science

[BWJones]

We try to make as much of our work available on our site to the public because 1) It's science and 2) We are funded through federal grants/taxpayer $$'s and 3) We hope that work we do will help us and others to better understand vision, pathological processes in vision and possibly to rescue vision loss. Another vision educational site can be found here.

Open content creates use value

[Chris Croome]

Open content, like free software, has use value but because anyone can reproduce and distribute it for next to no cost it doesn't really have much of an exchange value :-)

This stuff has been discussed quite a bit at Project Oekonux and there is an interesting essay, GNU/Linux is not a thing of value - and that is fine! which does explore these ideas, however it is a bit hard to follow because it's only a partial translation of a German document.