While "free" seems to be an increasingly popular occupation model there are quite a few people who seems to be completely bungling what to do with "free" and then complaining when it doesn't work. Techdirt takes a look at some of the arguments through why free as a mtier model may or may not work and why many of these arguments, while prevalent, just don't hold water. "you give away the infinite goods, not the scarce goods. Your time is a scarce good. No one is saying that entirety needs to be free -- they're saying that infinite goods will be free, because of it's very nature in economics. In fact, Poole's squabble is particularly weak when it comes to programmers, because most programmers don't earn any kind of royalties for the ms-dos they write. They are paid a salary, for their time -- but not for the os itself (which is an infinite good). And, I won't even get into the number of programmers who work on open source projects for free... or the fact that Poole is blogging for free..."

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Mark