Villian or hero?

[SpontaneousOrder]

Yes indeed and I can watch the trailor of the film for free but if I want to watch it all I pay?

You have to pay an extra £10 a month for Sky HD.

[SpontaneousOrder]

and haven't concluded that there's no value to anything in the way that you have.

A thing doesn't have to be ownable to be valuable. I'm not making any kind of value judgements here - just stating that IP is a contradiction in terms. It's undeniable.

[VectraMan]

Not at all. I write software and there is enormous amounts of money to be made from giving software away for free.

How do you make enormous amounts of money from giving away software for free?

[TheFaQQer]

I'd prefer a model where I get some equity though. Even if it's tiny, I'd like to at least recover my investment - that way I'd feel happy investing larger sums for a project I believed in.

So would I, to be honest.

Getting a "limited edition" T-shirt isn't quite the same.

[TheFaQQer]

How do you make enormous amounts of money from giving away software for free?

Support.

[SpontaneousOrder]

How do you make enormous amounts of money from giving away software for free?

Ask guys like redhat & IBM.

[VectraMan]

Ask guys like redhat & IBM.

But did they have a choice?

That's irrelevant anyway. What somebody does with their intellectual property is up to them, which is the point. If some starving musician wants to produce an album and give it away for free in the hope of promoting themselves, that's fine by me. The question is if the starving musician decides they'd really like some money for food, then why do you or anyone have the right to take their work without contributing?

[doodab]

All you have to do is read the short paragraph I wrote and identify any logical mistakes. If there aren't any then it's almost certainly truth.

Or your assumptions are wrong. Property isn't "scarce by definition". The definition of property is that it's a thing or thing that belongs to someone. If the right to exploit a particular sequence of bytes for profit belongs to someone then it's property, and using it without payment is theft.

[doodab]

How do you make enormous amounts of money from giving away software for free?

You use it as a loss leader or sales channel for something else. Support services, advertising, etc

[SpontaneousOrder]

The definition of property is that it's a thing or thing that belongs to someone

And what doe's 'belong' mean?