The widespread perception of open source is that it’s community work. Looking back at the first heyday of open source in the 90s, you picture these loosely organized, squabbling, collaborative efforts between a closely-knit group of nerds. Some special technology, notably Linux, emerged from that era as evidence that self-motivated teams of... See more

Here again, Eghbal provides a framework that transcends the open-source context that inspired it. In a digital economy, goods are either excludable or not (meaning paywall-able, essentially), and rivalrous or not (meaning infinitely copyable at zero marginal cost or not). The resulting 2 × 2 matrix describes just about every way to make a buck... See more

Historically, most of our questions about the value of content have focused on the distribution side, rather than the production side. Today, the most interesting questions we can ask will focus on how content is made and maintained, and by whom. We’ve previously treated content as a first-copy cost problem, and have developed solutions like... See more