Section 5.8. Open Models

5.8. Open Models

Dual licensing is, at base, the combination of a venerable business strategylicensing software for moneywith a relatively new open source distribution strategy. This combination is interesting and valuable on its own, but it is by no means the only such combination that is possible.

The global Internet makes the distribution of content much cheaper and easier than it ever was before. At the same time, it eliminates barriers to sharing among widely dispersed individuals and companies. The effect is to create new opportunities for the collaborative creation of intellectual property.

Some examples of this collaborative development were all but unknown just a few years ago. Weblogs, or blogs, are common today. They have emerged as an alternative source for news and information, replacing older media such as newspapers and radio, especially for fast-breaking stories. Similarly, the publication and production of scientific journals is changing. Single-vendor control over high-profile journals, and the vendor's ability to dictate pricing to the market, is eroding because researchers can collaborate and publish their research online more easily than ever before. Finally, some web sites encourage user contributions to make themselves more valuable to visitors. An excellent example is the book and other product reviews on Amazon.com. Amazon's visitors share their reviews with one another because they benefit from that sharing, but Amazon itself gains an enormous advantage because of the depth and breadth of those reviews.

In all three of these cases, old-fashioned ideas, like news distribution, journal publication, and product reviews, have been transformed by the open, collaborative processes that the Internet encourages. Licensing is as much an issue here as in software distributionownership of the content, and the right to distribute it online, must be considered carefully.

Collaboration and open distribution continue to transform the way that businesses operate. That transformation necessarily damages some established businesses, especially those where a middleman controlled the flow of goods or information, and was able to extract a fee from the flow. The Internet allows individuals to bypass that middlemanthe well-known "disintermediation" strategyand to share and publish on their own.

Any new business built on a disintermediation strategy must consider the law. Unlawful distribution of copyrighted music files is theft, not sharing, but that fact alone does not mean that the existing music retailing industry makes sense in a world with cheap ubiquitous bandwidth. The next generation of businesses must find ways to use the legal system to protect intellectual property, even while they take advantage of the powerful collaborative properties of the global Internet.