hyalineskies

Freedom: it’s a word that’s been poisoned by American politics into an adjective that almost always elicits the image of Uncle Sam when said on its own. Freedom, however, defines and underscores why our self-publishing Internet community has succeeded thus far, and freedom is why Web 2.0 has propagated throughout the Web as opposed to staying a niche phenomenon. We’ve built a democratic Web, full of choice and freedom. We elect our authorities via hyperlinks and use PageRank as our electoral college. Those elected, in turn, release to us information and intellectual property under a myriad of licencing options acceptable to us: the GNU General Public Licence, MIT Licence, and Creative Commons licences, among others. As information is copied, pasted, replicated, trackbacked, and commented upon, we further the ideals of our Web’s social environment.

As our new information architecture perpetually reinforces itself, it draws in new users and, with those, mainstream attention. As Yahoo! snaps up services such as del.icio.us, upcoming.org, and flickr, Google uses Ajax in their UI for mainstream applications such as Google Maps and Gmail. During this reinforcement of where we want to take the Web, thousands use this functionality without knowing its name or actual underlying operation. The vast majority of that same mass honestly doesn’t care to. What the mainstream Web user does know, however, is that whatever this newfangled Web two-point-oh software does, it’s cool and useful.

Wherever trends go on a significant level, those wishing to profit from them inevitably follow. They build proprietary systems and use mass marketing to get people to buy whatever it is that they’re selling. I’m sure there are plenty of commercial, proprietary Web 2.0 software packages that these trend bandwagoneers have written, but aside from Six Apart’s Moveable Type (which is a special case in itself,) I don’t know of many in widespread use.

You don’t need microeconomics to explain the supply and demand of a free good - multitudes will consume the free product if they have any use for it whatsoever. This is hardly a new observation; the difference is that Web 2.0 and its proponents took it a step further. It’s natural for us; the core framework used to build the vast majority of the Web - XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Rails, and the LAMP environment - were free from the start. Out of our respect for these technologies and the democratic, GNU-like culture surrounding them, our works of passion have used free licences as well. Flickr, last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler,) and other Web 2.0 poster children are free to anyone. If you just want to use the basic services, it’s considered more of a public service and less a consumable good.

Even our installable applications are free: programs such as WordPress, Trac, Typo, and MediaWiki are free under open-source licences. Because of this openness, the Web design and development community has flourished into a vibrant creative culture of caring coders and passionate users alike.

Finally, as this new socially-centred Web gains momentum, the corporate world, as well as the mainstream media, gets to see the GNU democracy in action in the social sphere as a whole, not only within a small *nix-based niche of system administrators and über-nerds. This time, the consumer is seeing the benefit of the GNU “Free Software, Free Society” mantra, and traditional corporations will inevitably be interested in whatever their consumers are. The problem here is that the consumers are really loving the free aspect of the social Web.

Because of this, we see the downfall of retail software and the reins of information breaking loose. Walled gardens and serial-number schemes fall to a dark cracking subculture almost instantly, and as more people feel comfortable with the GNU-based social atmosphere, paying retail prices for proprietary products that they may be able to get for free - with the free one being the superior good, at that - will become absolutely absurd.

As wonderful as the open source community is, designers and developers have to eat somehow. The traditional ways of the software industry are fading away from the perspective of the idealist, but the majority of the industry is still fee-based. Even Six Apart folded to some degree, charging for unrestricted versions of Moveable Type. As Six Apart faced a backlash from its users, it became evident that sometimes community philosophy must be sidestepped to support the authors of such a project. Where do we draw this line between commercialism and community?

As I’ve implied earlier, installable applications - that is, applications you download, such as WordPress, as opposed to use as a service, like Flickr - have generally been defined (and accepted) as a good. We’re beginning to see the revenue model shift toward service-based subscriptions in new applications such as 37signals’s Basecamp, where the proprietary source is kept locked away on company servers and you are charged for access. Some charge only for commercial use.

From a very simple microeconomic level, this shift to a service-based software market seems intuitive and practical. After all, software - especially software distributed electronically - has a negligible variable, per-unit cost; that is, software has a perfect increasing return to scale because producing yet another copy comes at zero cost to the developer. Because of this, charging per copy is a ripoff to the consumer. Simultaneously, applications, or even web design work contracted to a client, has an extremely high initial cost of development, or fixed cost. The first copy of a version of software costs developers thousands of man-hours and requires expensive technological capital. (This is a good reason why custom design and development is so expensive.) Once that fixed cost is compensated for, all other revenue is entirely profit. The cheaper your developers are in a good-based software economy, the faster that profit appears. The consumer - and more importantly, the community - gets shafted by prices that maximise producer benefit.

Creating distributable software, then, should strike a balance between keeping the developer comfortable and keeping the community alive. The fixed cost of development should be covered. This is exactly what clients do when they pay us for custom design work - we build them their applications as a service and much less as a good. The awkward part about this, economically, is that at the end of the service a good is produced that can be infinitely replicated for absolutely zero cost to the client or developer.

Generally, this provided good and its replication are disregarded as a developmental byproduct. They stay locked within the proprietary confines of corporate data banks and studio intellectual-property vaults.

Why? There’s good reason for it, sometimes: corporate identities are a good case of this (although people will rip them off anyway, if they so desire.) On a personal level, I keep this site’s theme proprietary to stay unique. By doing so, I’m hurting the efficiency of our community. My work is proprietary by choice. It’s also the same choice I’ve been giving to my clients.

In every proposal I write to a client where I’m not doing corporate identity work, I give them the option to where I will, free of charge and as a benefit to the community, package and licence the work I do for them under a Creative Commons licence. Once I’m done with their work, I’ll personally distribute the work on my site or give the packages to them for distribution if they ever wish to open-source the project. It’s an absurd premise from a designer, to say “Hey, you pay me to make this for you, and then I’ll release it for free to everyone else.” It was a risk I took to see if my clients had any interest in the surrounding community.

The first time I did this, for a WordPress theme I’m designing for an employee over at Guardian Unlimited, I wasn’t expecting any interest at all. Since I started making this option available at the beginning of this month, every client I’ve had thus far has chosen this option because they see the intrinsic value this work has to offer to our Web’s society. They’ve received what they wanted, and I’ve received what I wanted; why not do something for the community that supports us both? Although this concept is hardly anything new, our community - and the community my new-media-oriented clients value - lives upon information, and having the information I created for them widely available benefits everyone.

Surely, this free-release of content carries with it some caveats. As our community grows larger, so will its malicious sector. Spoofers, spammers, and counterfeiters could, in essence, create perfect copies of a client’s site for their own shady purposes in a much more accessible manner. We have to place our trust in the honour system, as well as our own self-policing, because there is far more good than bad. Plus, with slightly-restrictive licences such as the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND, we can legally protect ourselves from a lot of these pitfalls while still contributing to the community.

We must be able to expose ourselves to these vulnerabilities if we want to keep the Web’s democratic culture alive. A pessimist’s paranoia will only push us further away from our Web 2.0 ideals into a land of developmental regression, where commercialism conquers community for the sake of capitalism and proprietary rights. By doing so, we can easily destroy what we have built thus far and send our community into a tailspin. We will also, in turn, be invalidating the freedom inherent in Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the hypertext architecture. As those who wish to believe they are Web professionals (or protegés thereof,) we do not want to be the ones responsible for such a horrendous disaster.