Eben Moglen

Last night I had the great fortune to watch a speech on youtube given in October by Eben Moglen (the attorney for the Free Software Foundation). In this hour long speech he discusses the changing socio-economic landscape of the world, and how we can provide near limitless resources via technology to the poor at almost zero marginal cost. These parts dealing with the economics of creating software were less than convincing.

I remember reading probably twelve years this same argument in Mondo 2000's User's Guide to the New Edge, having to do with post-scarcity economy where the marginal cost of "copying" a loaf of bread were approximately zero. In the case of software, this is obviously very close to true. After Microsoft produces the first copy of Windows for $1,000,000,000 the second copy very close to $0 However, this just seems like two different ways to allocate costs. Anyway, I think about it and hopefully post something later.

That said, DO SEE THE SPEECH!