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Information wants to be free my ass
- viraptor 17y agoAs much as I agree with the post, I think it's silly to use this title in this context. It was used to describe actual information at first. See: http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html who also mentions my point: <<In The Willingness of Net-Consumers to Pay (1998), I wrote "The catch-cry that 'information wants to be free' is ambiguous. It was originally an assertion that the natural state is for information to be available, not protected. "The word 'free' in 'free software' refers to freedom, not to price" (Stallman 1992). But it is capable of being bastardised into an assertion that 'information wants to be gratis'. ... >> There's a big difference between "Information wants to be free" and "I should be able to watch Lost for free".
- yungchin 17y agoI agree the title is silly, but I didn't know what to change it to either :) The post seemed sort of unfinished to me, in that it doesn't really point out the fact that people apparently only want to pay for moving information around, rather than for the information per se. But I think that's what's in there, and it's just super-unintuitive to me.
- MaysonL 17y agoOf course, the original quote from Stewart Brand was: “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”