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Open source is a market force

Companies seek to counter their competition in a variety of ways - pricing, packaging, branding, etc. There are a lot of options and any good product manager will know them well. One of the toughest...

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For love or money?

There are really two bazaars that fire the boilers for free software: one dominated by talented amateurs who create for love; the other, by professionals who create for money. This creates a curious...

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Viral advertising via free software

One business model that I’m surprised hasn’t been further explored for funding free software is advertising. Ads have been a standard way to make “free” media pay in countries like the USA, where...

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Bored with this life - try Second Life

One of the principles of free software is the ability to develop on a platform for your own personal advantage without having to pays IP fees to the framework originators. As we see from the free...

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Free software may kill some software firms. So what?

Some people who advocate against free software claim that it's bad for the economy and not sustainable in the long term, because the lack of direct revenue on developing free software makes it harder...

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Impossible thing #1: Developing efficient, well engineered free software like...

With any paradigm shift, it is difficult to see the new world from the old one, even though it is glaringly obvious once you've crossed over. Empirical evidence is one way to bridge the gap. To that...

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Impossible thing #1: Debian GNU/Linux

With any paradigm shift, it is difficult to see the new world from the old one, even though it is glaringly obvious once you've crossed over. Empirical evidence is one way to bridge the gap. Let's look...

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Impossible thing #3: Free art and the Creative Commons culture

A new conventional wisdom began to spring up around free software, led in part by theorists like Eric Raymond, who were interested in the economics of free software production. Much of this thought...

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Impossible Thing #3: Free Arts

A new conventional wisdom began to spring up around free software, led in part by theorists like Eric Raymond, who were interested in the economics of free software production. Much of this thought...

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Impossible thing #4: The Blender Foundation and Movies

The bazaar development model turns out to be amazingly versatile: it seems that most software, even things you wouldn't think would be feasible, can be developed using such an approach. But there has...

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Creating wealth with free software

A report by the Standish Group indicates that adoption of 'open source' has caused a drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $60 billion per year. That's not a huge amount of...

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Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Most of the assumptions on which our present economic system is based are based on nothing much better than "conventional wisdom": which is a fancy way of saying "it just sounds plausible". Sometimes...

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Doing the Impossible

There is no "magic" to commons-based peer production. Most of the techniques that have brought free culture products ranging from software to art to electronic hardware have been in play for hundreds...

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Free Software economics for Indigenous Nations

Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving (Russell Means)Some of the surviving nations in North...

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Response to Sam Tuke's Response to "Is free software major league or minor?"

Thanks to Sam Tuke for a well-written and constructive response to my article Is free software major league or minor?. Tuke refers to my post as a "dismissal" of free software, however, which is ironic...

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Artists should be paid, Part 3: The Big Picture

Can artists actually make money on a free software driven free culture project? Having established the motivations and the basic principles in the first two parts, I'm going to look at the big picture...

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Exploitation? Entrepreneurship, Capitalism, and Making Money on Free Software

Recently, I was directed toward an excellent analysis of commons-based peer production as a phenomenon which separates "entrepreneurs" (who want to get things done and create value in the world) from...

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Piracy is not a problem; SOPA is not a solution

Recently, as I was browsing the shelves of my local used book store, I realized that I was engaged in "piracy" of exactly the same kind as what the legacy entertainment industry has slammed as a...

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Nielsen's report and Video on the Web

In the United States, Nielsen has long been the main source of data for evaluating television shows and stations for advertisers. It's considered a very reliable source. So their inclusion of data on...

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Free software programmers should be paid, too

You've probably heard of this intriguing new crowd-funding service called Kickstarter, right? (If not, how are you getting this website from that cave of yours?). A lot of people are using it to fund...

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