The Internet Will Be Paid…

Or so some guy named Barry Diller says. I beg to differ.

Unless
you've been living in a cave for a while, you've noticed that there's
an ideological war underway around content. By content, I mean
software, music, tv programs, movies, books, and any other piece of
information or entertainment you can package. The war is between paid and free, closed and open, restricted and unrestricted.
Did this war start with open source software? I'm not sure, but open
source has definitely helped arm the conflict. Let's consider the
content categories.

When you look for a software application
or you need to perform a task with software, you can almost always find
free software to do just about anything. In many instances, the free
stuff is nowhere near as good as its commercial counterpart (e.g. GIMP
vs. Photoshop). This reality keeps us software types employed for now.
But the free stuff is still there, and sometimes it's good enough.

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