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Comment by rick_perez | Hacker News Reader

Free access to everything is great, but you can't also complain that you have no jobs left when those companies can't pay people to actually do the research anymore.

Most of the information that Aaron was 'freeing' cost lots of money in research and development.

A true hero would create an organization that spent their own money on research and development and then give out the results for free. This takes real sacrifice.

Most of the people that propose that everything needs to be free are talking about the hard work of other people and freeing it against their will.

This is not my definition of a hero or even someone we should admire.

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I was under the impression that most of the information Aaron was freeing was publicly funded research. Elsevier et al do not fund research, they charge researchers to publish in their journals, they charge researchers to access those journals, and they generally lock down access to them. The thing they offer in exchange is conferring some of the prestige they've built up for their journals to your research paper.

Did he "free" any industry research?

I'm not wholly a fan of Aaron's approach here, but this critique seems a bit off-base.

JSTOR wasn't the organization doing the research and development. Various universities and academics, all tax-advantaged and often government-funded, were doing that research. And JSTOR charges them, not giving them a platform for free.

JSTOR itself does add value--it's a platform to publish, and presumably offers editing etc. But Aaron wasn't freeing any of the code that runs JSTOR, just the content it held. Compare it to the free ArXiv, which plays a similar role to JSTOR.

Sadly, editing is also volunteered by the same academics.

Does JSTOR add value, though? I used it a lot in college, but it's searching capabilities were terrible, and most of the articles were incredibly poorly scanned, almost unreadable.

Yes. Just because nowadays you can imagine much better implementations doesn't change how much a step forward it was in the 90s. There's a reason Aaron was able to download huge amounts of human knowledge in a couple hours. It'd have been pretty much impossible for him to do what he did before some organization like JSTOR.

>A true hero would create an organization that spent their own money on research and development and then give out the results for free. This takes real sacrifice.

Seeing as the man is dead as a direct result of his allegedly false heroics, I can't help but disagree with the implication in the latter portion of your statment.

Death is widely agreed upon as a very real sacrifice.

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