The Economics of Free: For Free
Remember the short piece I posted about the Radio 4 programme “In Business” a couple of weeks ago? Well, very kindly, the programme’s editor has provided me with a transcript of programme to
please use as you wish, but it has not been checked for accuracy. Good luck.
I have just read and listened again and didn’t find anything glaring although I did fix one rather amusing typo: “Linux Colonel” to “Linux Kernel”. It was sent to me as a Microsoft .doc file. I opened it in OpenOffice.org and exported it as a PDF so it should be readable by virtually everyone.
This programme does provide some excellent answers to the types of questions we repeatedly get asked in our day-to-day business:
- “How do they/you make money from Open Source”
- “Why should you/they give it away?”
So for those of you who get asked these sorts of questions and would like some non-technobable answers from a rather reputable source to use, the transcript can be downloaded in it’s entirety, for free, from our website here. On that page, there is also a link to the BBC’s permanent archive so the podcast can be retrieved too. As an interesting titbit, in his email with me, the editor said that about 600k people download the programme every month!
And just to whet your appetite, here is quite a nice quote from Chris Anderson – the editor of Wired…
… Microsoft’s financial success is about taking a product whose underlying economics are zero, the marginal costs of reproducing software is zero, and charging $300 for it. You know incredible net profit margins. Unfortunately, economics always wins. People recognised that the underlying economics of distributing software were zero and so they were like okay, so Microsoft is getting monopoly profits because they are in fact a monopoly. What we need to do is break the monopoly. Not, as it turns out, by regulation and regulator, but instead the marketplace broke the monopoly.
If you are involved in any way with the promotion of FOSS and/or CC then this really is well worth listening too and or reading,
And although the editor didn’t provide any specific license conditions with the document, I plan to repsect the BBC’s copyright, and provide suitable attribution when and where we use snippets etc; something like this http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/ perhaps.
BBC R4 In Business 08/01/2009
I’m an avid R4 listener, it’s by far the best radio anywhere; apart from The Archers of course… “Eauw Neauw” (The Open Sourcerer dons asbestos suit).
Anyway, over on Laney’s Blog Iain highlighted the most recent edition of Radio 4’s “In Business” (IB) programme. I do listen to IB quite often but had missed this one, so thanks Iain for pointing it out.
IB is a pretty bloody interesting programme generally, but this one was a great programme. It discusses in some detail both FOSS and Creative Commons and this makes an excellent introduction to both subjects for the non-technically minded listener. When the script is combined with Peter Day’s wonderfully full and rounded voice and enquiring mind, it makes a great podcast and listen again.
It’s a 30 minute programme. You can download the podcast (mp3) from here (I’m not sure how long it will remain available so I’d grab it for posterity if you want to) and you can also listen to it via the streaming iPlayer.
However, for me, there were certainly some really good snippets and quotes I’d love to be able to use to help promote FOSS to my customers.
An idea struck me whilst I was leaving a comment on Iain’s original post.
On behalf of my company, I have requested of the In Business team, that I might use snippets/transcripts of the programme, and also I asked if they will release this programme under a suitable CC license. After all, the discussion during the second-half of the podcast is all about the CC and Peter is clearly enthused by the subject, so I think it would be a good idea for the BBC to do this.
The contributor for the section on CC is James Boyle who is Chairman of the Board for Creative Commons so I doubt he would object 
Of course, if the BBC won’t/can’t release it under a CC license, that will also make an interesting follow-up post too…
