...I once asked Google's head of open source how much it would cost the company if it ran Windows on its servers, rather than Linux. I recommend it as a question to Googlers if you want to see eyes bulge....
Ask yourself this: if Linux didn't exist, would Google? ... "Free" underpins a huge amount of effort on the internet now, and that translates into real world commerce: Amazon uses those free building blocks too for its business, which is largely about shipping atoms, not bits....
Using those free products, Google and Amazon and hundreds or thousands of other companies out there generate real value, real money, real taxes....
[Another example is the] Global Positioning Systems, aka GPS, aka sat-nav. GPS didn't just fall into the sky. It cost a lot of money to put it up there, and a fair bit to keep going - about $400m annually, including satellite updates.
But here's the thing about GPS: it's free to use, and in the short time that it's been available outside the military, its use has exploded. Figures for the value of the market are hard to come by, but EADS-Astrium estimates (in the graph at the end of the link) that this year it's worth about €40 billion. That's a hell of a multiplier on something that you give away for free, given a comparatively small investment....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/06/2007 10:24:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
