Free Beer, Free Speech

We were used to deal with the freedom of software (among other intellectual property) from the (already reductive) legal point of view. In this realm, software was assimilated to art, and cultural products in general.

Now, after the success of Google, it is economists who take the lead. They explain us that software follows a model met already with fashion, in which the marginal value grows with the mass of the consumers. The wider a product is being distributed, the more it becomes valuable (one speaks of network economics, as opposed to economies of scale). The problem is thus one of bootstrapping, since the first consumers have far less reasons to buy the product. Therefore the investment in making the product free.
A hidden assumption is that profit has to follow, either directly by later selling enhanced versions, or indirectly via side-products or advertisment. The first goal is to create a market, with dependent customers, in order to make it profitable in a second step.

Is this the end of Free Software (earlier already repackaged as Open Source, mostly for reasons of political correctness, freedom being too threatening) ? Being assimilated to proprietary yet gratuitous products, it is less likely to challenge the structure of our world.

Freedom has indeed decayed from this of free speech, to this more mundane, of free beer (following the famous distinction made by Richard Stallman).

-- MarcGirod - 09 Sep 2007