Paraphrasing, but I do agree with the "information should be free but someone's time should not be" statement. How to properly execute and balance that though is the hard part
Don't sell manuals. Write manuals, and sell labor (I will make your device behave in X way by doing Y, as described in my manual). Don't sell software. Write software, and sell labor (I will configure your computer to do X using Y software).
We have been held back so much by the artifical scarcity of information... it's absurd. It's nice to have a nice, cushy ecosystem where you don't have to compete in your domain (ie hardware manufacturers bricking devices for "unauthorized" upgrades / fixes, software proprietors having a monopoly on maintenance), but imagine a world where you had to compete or fail. I think we ought to try that sometime.
While it is a nice idea ("information should be free"), I don't know that the statement is rooted in practical reality. Information doesn't have autonomy so needs to be created, it can have time value, it certainly has relevance value, or entertainment value, has quality value (signal > noise); all these things require effort to produce, maintain, curate, distribute.
Leaving the practical constraints behind, I also struggle to see moral or ethical reasons for information to be free. Which information should be free? All information? Why?
- Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman
I think a lot about how RMS's view on software freedom was warped by the highly intelligent and intellectual peer group that he must have been involved in at MIT.
It strikes me as endearing, but naive, to believe that most people would be able to treat software as anything but a black box simply if the source code were available to them.
Certainly, for most people using computers at MIT, when RMS was writing, this was true. But it is definitely not true that source code would have any use to most computer users (smart phone users, really) today. They simply would not have the ability to do anything with it.
One or multiple people who can study the software, even in small numbers, are still adding more information, and so more potential trust, than the alternative.
It seems like GitHub and other sources of open source software offer an opportunity to test your hypothesis empirically. I am biased to think that its existence demonstrates that source code is of use to at least many users.
I don't think end users modifying software is a realistic scenario, but that doesn't mean there aren't realistic scenarios enabled by Free software.
Having (appropriately licensed) source code available means people can pay others (with the necessary skills) to adapt software to their needs. Closed source software greatly restricts or removes that possibility.
The question becomes one of community and accessibility, and community begets accessibility. Opening source allows for easier access to fundamental aspects and lowers the "activation energy" of the whole process to develop and thus invites greater participation. Like how many man-hours get spent probing for vulnerabilities that enable jailbreaking? And note that these are specialized rarefied man-hours, and the whole system is also adversarial in that those seeking to crack the code are in competition with those trying to conceal it.
Pull all that out and make it all accessible and perhaps 13-year-old me would've tried to recode that 64x64 limit on the icons and learned something in the process, enable, iterate, participate...
The bigger win that I see, though, is enabling communities of users to band together and work together or finance development of software with the community's common goals in mind. That's not something that proprietary software has historically done much of, and proprietary software doesn't permit that community to fork the software when goals don't align.
In that book it seems that Kay eventually gave up that idea. Noticing it seemed that people would take years to be capable of doing interesting stuff with computers.
Which I think might be why his later research was more about just making code smaller and more comprehensible by domain experts.
Edit: It is worth noting that the idea seems to have been picked up by Dynamicland via their Realtalk protocol. Though I suspect they have ways to go before achieving that goal.
I have however looked at the mod_proxy_wstunnel module in apache and edited it to suit my needs. I never expected to do this, I'm not a developer -- certainly not a C++ developer, however running
sed -i 's/WebSocket/websocket/g' ./modules/proxy/mod_proxy_wstunnel.c
Likewise I have changed some custom filters on ffmpeg for my own build. Again that's C, and my C is horrible. I don't need to deal with the somewhat opinionated views of the ffmpeg developers to fold them back upstream - I can just have my 2 or 3 changed files to use them for my purpose.
Just because I don't look at the code for 99% of the software I use, it doesn't mean I don't benefit from it being free software, and for the 1% of cases when I do need to change something, I can. That's freedom, and I'm happy that the GPL ensures my freedom.
Free software is especially important in cases where the developers of proprietary devices use DRM as a secondary legal barrier (provided by 17 U.S. Code § 1201, section 1201 of the DMCA, in the US [1][2]) against otherwise non-infringing actions such as inspection (which is why access to source code remains a crucial requirement of free software alongside the freedom to modify) and repair. (Tangent: The EFF is arguing in Green v. Department of Justice that the anti-circumvention portions of DMCA 1201 violate the First Amendment [3].)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_and_Performance...
Since the cost to copy information (once the original bit patterns have been crafted, which process is, as you point out, typically costly) is close to zero it becomes regressive to charge for copies of information.
Clearly we should pay handsomely those who develop the original useful information.
- - - -
edit to add:
Sorry, I realized I was just paraphrasing the clip, and you probably already get it and are asking a different question, something like, granted that copying information is very cheap, still why should we just freely give each other useful information? Eh?
The answer there is that we're all in this together and we have serious challenges to face (climate, plastic and other "forever chemicals" and pollution, crashing of the marine ecosystem by destruction of plankton resulting in widespread famine (we eat more fish meat than all other animals), asteroids, etc.) and so we should do our best to accelerate our capabilities and power-with-wisdom to cope with it all.
Who will ensure the information is accurate? Why would we trust them (which is also a form of information).
Should all information (false, true, and everything in between) have equal cost in production and distribution? How do we update information?
Price as well as cost are tools to shape (for better AND worse) how we can prioritize information or decide how it should flow. There are countless examples of information that we as a civilization probably don’t want everyone to have easy access to. Also you as a private individual…
Freedom: would we force everyone who has some information to make it freely available and prohibit them from charging? Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s some information that should be much freer than it is today (looking at you, scientific community), but overriding people’s freedom to choose what information they make freely available and what they charge for strikes me as unjust.
In the most general sense I think we are going to rediscover the value and necessity of honor (or descend into a dystopia not worth thinking about.)
Systems of elements that can trust each other are more efficient than systems of elements that cannot.
> Should all information (false, true, and everything in between) have equal cost in production and distribution? How do we update information?
I don't understand these questions.
> Price as well as cost ...
Are these not the same?
> ... we can prioritize information or decide how it should flow. There are countless examples of information that we as a civilization probably don’t want everyone to have easy access to. Also you as a private individual…
Well there it is, eh? Control. Who's "we"?
Anyway, the original context would suggest that Brand meant something like "information that people can use to improve their lives" so he probably didn't mean like nuclear bomb plans, eh?
If you have information that people can use constructively without disadvantaging you then it's kind of venal not to share it, eh? That's the moral or ethical reason for (some) information to be free.
- - - -
As an aside, you are inverting the logic here:
> overriding people’s freedom to choose what information they make freely available and what they charge
Physically we do not have that freedom, once data has been encoded in digital bits it becomes difficult to prevent dissemination of those bits. (I'm old enough to have seen Napster in action back in the day.)
Copy prevention (DRM) and commercial activity had to be implemented on top of the fundamental ability of the computer network to duplicate and transmit bits.
In other words if you have information you would keep secret don't put it in a computer.
The point is that information per se is non-rival and non-scarce, so the normal drivers of market exchange don't apply to it. Since we want to incentivize the creation of information, we have created positive law that generates artificial scarcity, and allows market forces to work mostly as they would for physical goods, but this is just a stopgap solution due to the difficulty of commoditizing the downstream uses of information.
To echo another commenter in this thread, if we were better at commoditizing and marketing the uses of information directly, rather than the information itself, we wouldn't need to use artificial scarcity as a proxy to generate that incentive.
> all these things require effort to produce, maintain, curate, distribute.
But these inputs are not the determinant of the value of the end product. They only describe the process of creating it, but value is determined by the subjective utility enjoyed by the end consumer.
If you view time and effort necessary to create and distribute information as a capital expenditure on par with the time and effort necessary to design and manufacture any physical good, perhaps things come into clearer relief. Is anyone entitled to a guaranteed return on capital investments, or are they bearing risk in making them in pursuit of a potential, but uncertain, return? I think most people would hold the latter view.
> Leaving the practical constraints behind, I also struggle to see moral or ethical reasons for information to be free.
I'm not sure I see where moral or ethical considerations even come into the discussion. The closest moral consideration that applies to the question is the way it affects property rights, but in that regard, it seems that it's the artificial scarcity in information that seems to lack sufficient moral justification.
There are no natural property rights in information itself, due to its conceptual and non-rival nature, and the attempt to take the norms of ownership associated with natural property and apply them to information actually constitutes an abridgment of natural property rights: functionally, 'intellectual property' amounts to a restriction on what patterns other people may arrange their own physical materials into, based on fallaciously reifying the pattern itself into a putative concrete thing to which rivalry applies.