Free vs Freely Distributed

I'm somewhat surprised that "Free" as a concept gets people so hot under the collar.

Like the concept of "Open Source" or "The Selfish Gene" people seem to become enraged by the very thought of it and end up responding to straw men of their own creation.

I've not read the Anderson book but anything I've read by him on the topic seems almost boringly obvious to me, and I would assume anyone who spends much time online.

I can understand people not liking it if their industry and therefore livelihoods are under threat, but for anyone else it's seems too banal to get worked up about.

Here's John Gruber reacting in a bizarrely prickly manner when readers pointed out that they are consuming his ad supported blog for "free":

"Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets charged. Readers don’t, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I’m earning a nice salary. Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers such as yourself. But there’s nothing free about it."

I can't connect that in any sane way to what I've read from Anderson, only to some "freetard" (I really dislike that word) caricature of his position. I fear Gruber would have a stroke if I pointed out that probably most (and the best) of my online reading matter is both produced and delivered without direct payment or advertisment.

Mark Cuban's argument about the economics of Free is much better than Anderson's original thesis or Gladwell's retort, which both rely heavily on convenient anecdotes and clever phrasing. I guess that's the difference between a successful businessman and pop-economics writers who sell ideas to the masses.

He ignores a huge number of problems: for example, if you copyright news (i.e. the facts), who owns it. It is often reported independently by multiple sources in parallel. Can no one else talk about an exclusive at all? If you need to pay to link or to re-produce short quotes you destroy a lot of the usefulness of the web. Those are the sort of copyrights the newpaper industry are talking about.

With regard to music, yes it is expensive to promote music, but that it partly because of competition from lots of other well funded people. Reduce the funding the everyone, and it will become cheaper.

That said, some of the comments are very insightful.