Comments on: Free isn’t easy

By: Gary

Gary — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:33:17 +0000

This is good:

http://broadstuff.com/archives/1776-The-Free-Market-for-Snake-Oil-and-the-Age-of-Unreason.html

“Lets be clear, Anderson is proposing the economic version of a perpetual motion machine, but that’s not the point of this post – quacks, charlatans, snake oil salesmen and journalist-authors on the make have been with us a long, long time. ( I’ll get to what’s wrong his theory tomorrow, but in essence its impossible to have the All Free to All Men, All the Time case )

The interesting point is that it is far, far harder to rebut these sort of claims in the new media, especially if the claimants have access to a good channels of their own.”

By: Gary

Gary — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:28:35 +0000

To be fair, Anderson is giving away free versions (online and audiobook) for a while, although IIRC that wasn’t his original plan. But there’s a great deal of hypocrisy in this field, with new media pundits charging huge sums to write articles and deliver seminars to newspapers telling them all their content should be free. And there’s the fans of free at The Pirate Bay, who have just become millionaires…

By: Squander Two

Squander Two — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:05:47 +0000

Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99)

Said it all, I thought.

By: Gary

Gary — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:57:03 +0000

I know. There’s an entire industry of people charging extremely large sums of money for books on, or talks about, how everybody should be giving everything away for nothing. Step three, profit.

By: Squander Two

Squander Two — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:29:11 +0000

That is so obvious it shouldn’t be brilliant, but so many fools are obsessively pushing their huge-blind-spot-based thinking that it is.