I believe there is a principle woven into the fabric of the universe that says the more you share your information, the more you will benefit from it. Evidence of this is unfolding before our eyes. The best websites and blogs give tons of information away - and turn a profit. Many corporations give information away - and they still make money. Many universities are podcasting their courses for free. They wouldn’t do so if they didn’t stand to gain in some way. You can see this in action everywhere and the trend will continue.
Facebook announced yesterday that they will be giving away Thrift as open source. Thrift is a software framework that allows you to easily build services that work across multiple programming languages. Their reason for the release is short, but clear:
Many large corporations are famous for keeping this type of tool under lock and key, but we think we stand to gain much more by collaborating with other smart companies and developers.
Rather than keeping their “intellectual property” under lock and key, they are giving it away in order to gain through the reciprocation of other smart companies and developers. I wonder if anyone was urging them not to give Thrift away. Maybe the conversation went along these lines:
If this “open information principle” is a universal principle, then we should be able to apply it to other forms of intangible property like patents and trade secrets with the same result. This would turn our generally accepted ideas of patents, trade secrets, etc. upside-down. We would also have to be able show that no one has ever suffered from giving their information away. I would like to start developing a body of theory to describe and qualify the benefits received by those that share information - like open source software - and apply it to the rest of the world. This has probably already been started by someone somewhere. If you have any ideas where to look, let me know. I’m going to start my search at the Mises Instute.Facebook Visionary: We are going to give away Thrift for free.
Facebook Dimwit: Are you crazy? Thrift took us forever to develop. It’s worth millions of dollars. We need to sell it under a perpetual license.
Facebook Visionary: It takes a large amount of resources to convince others that they should use Thrift. Only those that could profit from it’s use immediately would buy it. It isn’t immediately clear that we could turn a profit fast enough or that the profit is greater than the amount we stand to gain in development, mind-share, and Facebook members. It is clear that, with the improved Thrift, we can offer our customers an even better product and make much more money with much less effort.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Mike Masnick // Apr 3, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Hey Jon,
I’ve been noodling over this for a bit in a series of posts on Techdirt. Basically, it’s a look at how economics doesn’t fall apart when you make things non-scarce — and that means you don’t need intellectual property laws to profit. The most recent is here, and from there you can go back through the whole list of posts…
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070322/024237.shtml
Another place to look is the work of economists David Levine and Michele Boldrin who are working on a book on the topic:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm
2 Rob Newby // Apr 7, 2007 at 10:30 am
Hi Jon,
We briefly discussed this idea over email a couple of weeks back, and the economics part is something which I didn’t properly consider. You’ve taken it a step further with this article, but essentially you’re talking about giving people free tasters or incentives to hook them into products or services. I liked your original idea of licensing data, which I postulated might be possible if you could attach an identity to each piece of data as it was created. This is something which may be facilitated with the Semantic Web. I’ll be posting some better formed ideas soon. Keep in touch with your findings though, I’m very interested.
Cheers,
Rob.
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