Information does not care

From: Peter Larsen <plarsen_at_mail.utexas.edu>
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 09:56:02 -0500

Alex Ferguson:
>First Greg gets flak for giving away too much stuff for free on the web;
>now he gets it in (the other side of) the neck for not giving _everything_
>free on the web. I don't know if that ought to make him feel comforted
>he's steering a sensible Middle Way, or just like he's getting beat up
>from both wings simultaneously.
>
>I don't see where this "play with the big boys" comment comes from. You
>seem to be saying that regardless of what's on the GTA site, you feel
>deprived of a warm fuzzy feeling for not being able to peruse it for
>free. Would it be "OK" if instead it were printed as another set of
>spiral bound pre-pub miscellanea (to which I think you might usefully
>compare it in many cases, if not yet more "pre-"), or would you still
>complain about that as an elitist and divisive distribution medium if
>it required payment, and you weren't able or willing to provide same?

        There's also the question of what you think you are getting. I joined the GTA at the Initiate level because:

1. I could spare $100
2. I wanted to see what was posted on the site

but, most importantly,

C. I wanted to support Glorantha and Issaries and Greg Stafford.

        When Issaries was first announced, there was a stock deal bandied about, which fell through for various legal reasons (I don't recall all the details). The GTA, as I understand it, is a sort of "intellectual property" version of the same thing -- you give Issaries money so that they can keep running and you get some sort of dividend (in this case access to some pre- (or pre-pre-) publication Gloranthan stuff. It was never meant to be a "fair" trade in the sense of giving x value of product for x amount of money. So why did I pony up to an "unfair" system? A and B, above, sure, but mostly C -- I have really enjoyed Glorantha since RQ I; Greg Stafford's work has given me an immense amount of pleasure over the years and I wanted to give something back to Greg and his company, partly to keep Issaries going, but also to say "thanks" and "I believe in what you do."

Andreas Gustafsson:
>> Information wants to be free, it's just not sure about how and with whom.

Alex:
>That phrase is normally Greg's trigger to be lured into a defence of
>the ad hoc mess that are intellectual property laws (which is an
>unfortunate position to put anyone in, frankly). Let's not confuse
>this misapplied GPLish thinking with "artistic endeavour is just damn
>well going to have to learn to love losing money at an even faster rate".

        Besides, information does not "want to be free" in the sense of costing nothing; information wants to move around. Only, of course, in the sense that information "wants" anything. Really, it's just another way of saying "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead."

Peter Larsen

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