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Getting the "Free" Business Model Wrong Doesn't Mean the Model is Flawed
While "free" seems to be an increasingly popular business model, there are quite a few people who seem to be completely bungling what to do with "free" and then complaining when it doesn't work. Techdirt takes a look at some of the arguments surrounding why free as a business model may or may not work and why many of these arguments, while prevalent, just don't hold water. "you give away the infinite goods, not the scarce goods. Your time is a scarce good. No one is saying that everything needs to be free -- they're saying that infinite goods will be free, because of it's very nature in economics. In fact, Poole's argument is particularly weak when it comes to programmers, because most programmers don't earn any kind of royalties for the software they write. They are paid a salary, for their time -- but not for the software itself (which is an infinite good). And, I won't even get into the number of programmers who work on open source projects for free ... or the fact that Poole is blogging for free ..."
I laugh when I see people complaining when free woftware has bugs in it. I reply to that with "And Windows never has any problems or bugs" They stop at that point because they relize that the free software is better than the commercial software, and they don't complain about the commercial software.
-- (this is a sig) My Computer Programming Forumhttp://www.programers.co.nr/
The article makes a plausible argument, but fails to give any real world examples.
I don't respond to AC's.
Some people will always blame others for their failures. It's just that right now it is fashionable to bash Free Software.
I believe that this is because more people are trying to make $$MILLIONS$$ personally (remember the old Microsoft millionaires) on software that other people have written.
Essentially, they're trying to put an artificial bottleneck between the consumers and the product so they can extract money from the bottleneck. Lots of money. When they don't get lots of money, they whine. When someone else renders the bottleneck ineffective, they whine.
There's the OS model as manifested by Ubuntu, RH, SUSE, and others. Each has different market motivators and success.
There's the cool-app model, like MySQL, Apache, and others that depend on application support and transparency across a lot of software disciplines.
There's the vertical app model, like Asterisk, that uses hardware/software/extensions to motivate the community, each making a few cents in within sub-markets.
There's the 'fringe' app (not said in a deragotory way) that uses a shareware-like valuing through paypal, donationware, and other 'love of the art'/hacker's bent.
And these are only a sampling of general categories. F/OSS in the Stallman model doesn't have to be a vow of poverty. On the contrary, we're only scratching the surface of how F/OSS makes money.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
No human effort is free. All human efforts require time and energy, overhead and maintenance. This is more so true when the efforts are subsidized by a company. When a contributor gives effort to the improvement of software that is to be made freely available to all he (or she) is engaged in a contract wherein he can expect a benefit called "progress."
Such a contributor may offer this up for the benefit of all, but that point is not important to the contract. As long as there are two contributors in the world so involved that their efforts benefit each other the terms of the contract are kept and the benefit is achieved. That there are many, many contributors so engaged amplifies the benefit for all.
Progress benefits us everyone. Perhaps "free" isn't the right word after all.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A good business model is simple and robust enough that it's hard to screw up. If a company is brave enough to try a "free" business model, and it fails, it was probably explained to them in poor and simplistic terms.
Once you start tacking on conditionals and making the model more complex, it is no longer a good business model. Blaming companies that can't figure it out helps no one.
Just because you have an idea that works well in a theoretical context, and there have been a few success stories, does not mean that it's a good model.
It's not that things ought to be free because they can be free -- but that things will be free because that's just basic economics. Price gets driven to marginal cost in a competitive market, and the reason it happens is because others do learn to put in place business models that work, and then if you're the lone holdout, people start to ignore you.
This is just the limiting case of the market. This is what destroyed DEC and other big hardware companies that tried to avoid producing cheap computers that would outcompete their high margin ones. People didn't buy the VAX instead of their desktop PDP-11s running stripped down RSX (P/OS, what a perfect name for an OS that was), people bought desktop micros that had processors that might have sucked compared to the LSI-11... but they cost so much less that there was no demand for something in the middle.
So now one of the things that's hurting traditionally marketed music sales is nontraditionally marketed music. The marginal cost of production of music is now nearly zero, therefore if you can make enough money to make it worthwhile to keep selling a small number of CDs at CDBABY based on the free samples you give away at LAST.FM, why wouldn't you? If you can get your music onto iTunes and Amazon for nothing, and get modest sales and the possibility of better sales (look at how Jonathan Coulton's doing, eh?), you're going to do that as well as playing gigs and trying to get the attention of the big labels and all the other stuff that musicians have been doing for years.
And so people like me get our music from last.fm and 3hive.com and Amazon and iTunes and don't bother going to the record store or listening to the radio (which is all the same Clear Channel approved pulp anyway)... because it's getting easier and easier to find out about the people who are making free work for them... mostly free, just enough that's not free to keep the people making the free stuff to keep people like me going "hey, that's good, I'll get their album" now and then...
And what's the value of something that doesn't exist? Until someone comes along and creates the work you consider to be available in infinite quantity, it's only available on zero quantity. Given that that is the extreme end of scarcity no amount of money will allow you to buy it. Does that make the act of creation of infinite value?
Maybe you shouldn't try and hang your economic philosophy on old ideas of supply and demand?
It's easy to see this in the logical (and hopefully soon, prevalent) way when one talks about the scarce vs non-scarce goods.
I've given up thinking or caring or trying to explain to others whether or not illegal downloading hurts authors. Now I just point out how stupid it is to trade a scarce good, like money or food, for a non-scarce one, like a digital reproduction. It just doesn't make any kind of mathematical or economical sense.
If a person wants to give their favourite author some money, fine. But call it what it is: a donation, not a trade.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
A good business model is simple and robust enough that it's hard to screw up.
All business models are easy to screw up. Most new companies fail within a very few years.
This isn't a matter of blaming companies, it's a matter of recognizing reality.
Just because you have an idea that works well in a theoretical context, and there have been a few success stories, does not mean that it's a good model.
The article wasn't about a business model, it was about why some business models work and others don't. There are many business models that involve giving away one good to promote the sales of other goods that you can sell at a higher margin. "Give away the razor and sell the blades" is a business model, and obviously a successful one, but do you expect to get into that business today, without a lot of effort and luck?
The first lesson this article is trying to impart is that when you have a good that has a high marginal cost of production, and one that has a low marginal cost of production, you are probably not going to succeed if you give away a lot of the ones that cost you a lot to produce, but you may be able to succeed if you can give away the ones that don't cost much to produce to drive the sales of the higher cost one.
The second is that there are many business models that can be based on the fact that some goods have a zero marginal cost of production. If you are going to make a living that way, you need to come up with one of them. But just noticing that a good has a zero marginal cost of production isn't a business model.
This works well if you are a consulting house. But the danger is that you are so scarce that you cannot replicate yourself fast enough for support, so you will not support what you do either. Someone else will, and you'll risk having nothing because you've given away the only thing that you truly owned, which was the part you contributed.
This also takes a dim view of what you are contributing, as if the only part of coding was implementation. Good design is, alas, not copyrightable, and so is difficult to protect. But that doesn't mean it wasn't scarce. It just means there isn't good protection for that kind of scarcity. And since many participants in the discussion are predisposed to think that protection of any kind of intellectual property is bad just because they've seen some things in intellectual property that it was demonstrably bad to protect, the possibility of adding intellectual property protection of one kind or another doesn't occur.
I actually think a lot of the problems of IP protection are due to the duration of the protection and not the fact of it (though I do agree there are also things that are protected foolishly). My point is that if they expired quickly, it wouldn't matter much if there were mistakes made favoring creators, but it would give the creator time to negotiate before the fact that he created something was irrelevant because everyone else had it and was exploiting it to their advantage, not to his.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
What about stupidity?
My blog
Perhaps you are the one making a basic blunder: when people outside of Slashdot talk about "Free", they mean the dictionary "Free" as abscribed to a product, not the "RMS definition of Free".
There is nothing in the article related to open source licenses, etc. They're completely irrelevant to the economic argument - and frankly, to the common mechanics of the industries that the article describes.
That's the problem with arbitrarily redefining perfectly good words in common use.
Don't expect the rest of the world to suddenly adopt your new meanings for their own words - most of them don't know (or give a rat's derriere) about such terminology.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
I still don't get it.
My brother writes books and magazine articles. He gets paid for his books and articles. He also publishes some stuff 'for free' on his blog (there's a free e/audio-book on there right now for instance). However, his core, major work isn't free. This way he can afford to feed and clothe his children. If he gave his stuff away, or asked for contributions he wouldn't make any money (he knows this because he's tried unsuccessfully).
How does an author who writes 8 hours a day make a living if he gives his stuff away?
Or does he become a carpenter and write for fun an hour or two a week because writing is not a 'career path', but being a mechanic or carpenter is?
Please explain.
[/flame]
In the real world:
1) Software costs a lot of money to design, write, document and support, and little money to reproduce, and the latter therefore plays little role in determining price, regardless of how much potential customers want to whine "but it costs you nothing to reproduce - it's an infinite resource"
2) Software is basically ideas encoded as 1's and 0's. The 1's and 0's may be an infinite resource, but the ideas are not. Some ideas are scarcer than others, or more expensive to turn into 1's and 0's, and you may expect to pay more for them according to this scarcity and conversion cost.
Support does not only mean a help desk and bug fixes, but also include customization and integration with the customers' existing systems. Even if you would write perfect bug-free software, those two demands wouldn't magically vanish.
That someone probably wouldn't have written code up to the standards of the project's maintainer, thus it wouldn't have gotten accepted upstream, thus we would have had to keep paying that someone to update their code every time we wanted to port to a newer version of the upstream product. Sure, it might save some money in the short term (but then it might not -- communications problems can throw off a release schedule pretty easily, and a slipped release date costs more money than any fax subsystem enhancements are worth)... but getting code upstream is well worth it.
We'll see how that goes; outsourcing everything is the approach that company is taking right now. As a shareholder, I wish them the best... but I'm not exactly holding my breath.
That is incentive enough to produce something that doesn't look like complete crap to your fellow geeks. It doesn't mean that you can deliver a damn thing that is usable by anyone else.
The problem in the modern era is not that the marginal cost has come down(it was never all that high), but that the copyright holders have breached their side of the contract. The length of copyright is such that a copyright holder can sometimes ensure that one or two pieces of work can provide an income not only for themselves but for their descendants. While wise investment of the profits from a successful creative work has always had this capability, it is only fairly recently that the creative work itself could do this.
This not only means that creative individuals(and the children of creative individuals who might have otherwise been creative themselves) are, contrary to the intention of the social contract not encouraged to create, but that their works do not reenter the public domain and provide value to society in general.
Copyright law cannot be enforced because the majority of people do not believe they are doing anything wrong when they break it. The reason(IMO) for this is that they feel consciously or not, that the other side broke the deal first. Unless copyright returns to it's original intent, or the social contract is successfully redefined(a difficult proposition for all those reeducation classes they want to give students since it's hard to convince someone that they shouldn't want a fair deal), copyright will die. If copyright dies, a great number of ideas and creations that might otherwise benefit society may never be created and industries and creative individuals will be forced to conceal their ideas in order to protect their value.
This would not be a good thing, so for the good of society hopefully we can find a compromise where artists and inventors get to make a living(though not forever) and society gets free access to creativity(though not right away).
For the most part, I agree with you. Unfortunately we are currently educating people that violating copyright is OK. Every student going through school today gets this from other students and gets nothing in the way of information opposing this view. I would claim that it makes no difference whether or not "getting a fair deal" has anything to do with it. If people are conditioned to believe that murder is good under the right circumstances, they will happily participate in murder. Just check out the Aztec society for an example of this.
I don't care what your belief is on copyright, right or wrong. We are creating a society in which all digital materials have a value of zero. This isn't a good idea.
Finally, on the subject of entering the public domain I have to seriously question the benefit of most things entering the public domain. Today we have companies which have at the core only a relatively few valuable properties like this. You can perhaps argue if this is a good thing overall for society in general but I believe the value is demonstrated each and every day that the company derives revenue from sale of these properties. In other words, if Mickey Mouse has any value at all it is because this value is being actively exploited by the Disney company. Without Disney, there would be no value for Mickey Mouse. I would also say that without Microsoft the Windows trademark has no value. I don't think there is any way around it.
You can try to destroy the value of these and other properties but all you are going to end up doing is removing the revenue stream and devaluing the property. In isolation, these properties have no value. This differs considerably from a relatively few works that exist. I contend that the Mona Lisa has value quite apart from any licensing or copyright. At the same time I contend that the drawing I made as a six year old child can be copyrighted but has no value apart from whatever might be derived from licensing it - hopefully zero.
The more people who see a painting they love, or listen to music they love, or see a play/movie that moves them, or see how things work and can build off that work to create something new the better off we are as a society. This is what they mean by information wanting to be free.
Copyright is a compromise/social contract between the needs of society to have more and more beautiful things and the needs of artists to be able to create beautiful things without starving to death. Society knows that information has no intrinsic monetary value because it has an infinite supply, but it also realizes that information has an incredible non monetary value and so it's production needs to be encouraged.
I agree with you that the fact that the youth of today are becoming more and more anti-copyright is a tragedy. I've already said that I believe a world without the creative works that are possible because of copyright would be a poorer place to live.
On the other hand I believe that today's youth being anti-copyright comes more from the fact that the copyright holders have abused their side of the deal than from anything else. They take as much value as they can and give nothing back.
Your issues with Mickey Mouse and the Windows Logo are more issues of trademark than copyright which is a different sort of situation(and particularly complex in situations like Mickey Mouse where copyright and trademark overlap), but even on that grounds I think that it would be better to have everyone who wants to watch Steam Boat Willy or Snow White or even some of the more recent Disney productions than for Disney to be able to control and profit from them after all these years.