The Fetish of Free

fetish: \ˈfe-tish

1a: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence.

1b: an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion

I just finished reading Chris Anderson's book, Free: The History of a Radical Price. It's quite good. While listening to the book (it's available...for free...at audible.com), I couldn't shake the sense that, for many, "free" software has become a fetish, to the great harm of us all.

This morning, I happened upon a blog post complaining of an open source project with woefully inadequate documentation. The blog's author complained that while there was documentation, it -- horrors! -- cost money! How dare people, after spending often hundreds of hours writing code, want to be paid in some way!

I can't count the number of times when struggling to understand an undocumented library's features, I wished the author had simply charged enough for the software to make both documentation and ongoing maintenance financially viable. Or -- an alternative -- offer the software for free but charge for robust documentation. But the fetish of free forbids such crass commercializaton.

But consider whether time or money is really more scarce. If I spend 4 hours and a good deal of frustration trying to get something to work, what exactly have I "saved" over purchasing the software? I said that there is a fetishization of free, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there's a fetishization of money. Under this idea, we value money above all and it's so sacred that keeping its powerful mojo close to us is worth sacrificing what is truly scarce and irreplaceable: time.

I wrote a story about this back in December available at the link below. Memes are powerful things. But memes can be both constructive and destructive. The idea that "information wants to be free" or "software wants to be free" is, it seems to me, terribly destructive to software developers, for whom our knowledge is what economists call a "wasting asset" and for whom continuous learning is an absolute necessity. Isn't it time to bury this meme and value people (and their time) over money?