The Open Learning Centre

Many people we talk to in our daily work sometimes struggle to understand how, in business, concepts such as Free, Open Source and Creative Commons can actually work in an economic sense.

On the 8th January 2009 BBC Radio 4's "In Business" programme aired on this very subject of Free. In this 25 minute documentary entitled Free For All, Peter Day investigates the new economy of Free, looking at Open Source Software and Creative Commons Licensing.

This programme provides an excellent, non-technical, explanation where Peter Day interviews Chris Anderson, the Editor of the magazine Wired, and Professor James Boyle, Chairman of the board of Creative Commons and Law Professor at Duke University in North Carolina.

"... Microsoft’s financial success is about taking a product whose underlying economics are zero, the marginal costs of reproducing software is zero, and charging $300 for it. You know incredible net profit margins. Unfortunately, economics always wins. People recognised that the underlying economics of distributing software were zero and so they were like okay, so Microsoft is getting monopoly profits because they are in fact a monopoly. What we need to do is break the monopoly. Not, as it turns out, by regulation and regulator, but instead the marketplace broke the monopoly."

The podcast is available permanently from the BBC's In Business website here.

We are also extremely grateful to the BBC as they have provided The Open Learning Centre with a transcript of the full programme (please note the disclaimer regarding accuracy at the beginning of the document) which you can download from here; for free.