"Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable." I first heard this gem from Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language. Like many other open-source software authors, from Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, to Tim Berners-Lee and his spiritual descendants at the Apache web server project, Larry discovered that one way to make his information (i.e., his software) more valuable was to make it free. Larry was thus able to increase its utility not only for himself (because others who took it up made changes and enhancements that he could use), but for everyone else who uses it, because as software becomes more ubiquitous it can be taken for granted as a foundation for further work. The Internet (based on freely available software including TCP/IP, BIND, Apache, Sendmail and so on) demonstrates clearly just how much value can be created by the distribution of freely available software.



Nonetheless, it is also clear that others, Bill Gates being the paramount example, have found that the best way to make their information valuable is to restrict access to it. No-one can question that Microsoft has created enormous value for itself and its shareholders, and even its critics should admit that Microsoft has been a key enabler of the ubiquitous personal computing on which so much of our modern business world depends.



What many people fail to realize is that both Larry Wall and Bill Gates have a great deal in common: as the crea