Sorry to be a bit late to come back. Good post, even if I disagree. But as I understand it the definition of commodity is such that each unit is of equivalent worth to another, right?

I’m a PoliSco grad, so I pretty much have learned how to fake economics but not much else in that field. All the same, a barrel of oil is a barrel of oil, no? Like wise for copper, RAM, et al. But your writing and a random guys writing at a per word rate? Odds are that there will a substantial difference in quality. As I see it , that’s the difference (?)

Music is a social interaction; in the olden days everyone made music together. No one charged each other for the privilege. If you really love music, learn to make it yourself, you know, with an instrument or, your voice, and with your friends. It’s quite a nice experience. No money is required either.

‘Predatory pricing’, ‘dumping’: my lord, what rot! This is music and culture we’re discussing, not your corporate world of lead ingots.

Yes, I am giving away free music as a way to introduce people to my stuff…sorry if that offends you!

I’d say that there is a 1-to-1 relationship of value for writing, too, sort of. An hour I spend reading the free stuff that’s being dumped on the market is an hour I don’t spend reading the stuff I have to pay to read.

But maybe I’m showing my age. I am told that the younger generation can carry on a couple dozen IM conversations while reading their homework and listening to music. So maybe it doesn’t apply to them.

And Mongo is ride when he says selling below cost is different from selling below price. I should have said selling below cost. I have no idea what selling below price really means. But whether the marginal cost of producing another copy is zero or not, it has the same effect on the marketplace as dumping lead ingots.

And there is a cost in production for words, software or anything else. At the bare minimum there is the author/programmer’s time. Giving software or books away doesn’t pay my rent. And…with very few exceptions most of the free (as in beer) software that is out there is worth exactly the price charged. The greatest exception to this is Mozilla Foundation who squeeze no small amount of money from search engine referrals from their browsers.

“Free” software is a great place to learn your chops but the only place that pays worth anything to be a developer is still in the pay-to-play world of software.

That is actually a very good point.

As a proponent of F/OSS, I can acknowledge that F/OSS actually killed of entire industries, such as the commercial Java IDE industry. Yet still, as developers (the users of the Java IDEs) we are happy with that.

Makes you think …

Dumping is a predatory tactic to blow competitors out of business and then, after they’re gone, the dumper raises prices. This is fundamentally *fundamentally* different from people giving away their content.

If the public prefers free stuff to your pay stuff, screw you, go get a job. Since people first tried to sell words, their words are competing for peoples’ interest and attention, and unless your stuff is sufficiently interest-worthy to me, I’d prefer to jerk off or watch baseball.

- Steve Jobs is the Real Steve Jobs. The majority of people that know his name know it because of what he has done.

- Daniel Lyons is the Fake Steve Jobs. MOST people know who he is because of his “connection” to Steve Jobs.

- Alan Jacobs is some guy that posts on some blog site. He got some extra hits recently ’cause he poached the term “freetards” from Daniel Lyons.

- John Gorentz is “The Reticulator”. Though I had to go through an extra mouse click just to find his name. Probably get’s more add hits way. Gotta get paid, y’know.

So, John has now glommed onto Alan who glommed onto Dan who glommed onto Steve. I’m thinking we’re only one degree away from Kevin Bacon. Cool.