If you think that Open Source is about it being "free" in the sense of not paying for it, you're missing the point. It's about being "free" in the sense of freedom of speech and freedom to create and re-mix intellectual property, unfettered.

Information wants to be free, after all.

But it's more than that. According to John Perry Barlow in his classic Wired article from 1994, The Economy of Ideas:

• Information Is a Verb, Not a Noun - Information is something that happens when minds or objects or other pieces of information interact.
• Information Is Experienced, Not Possessed - It's something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code.
• Information Has to Move - If it isn't moving it ceases to exist as anything but potential.
• Information Is Conveyed by Propagation, Not Distribution - It cannot be shipped around like widgets, because it doesn't simply move on; it leaves a trail everywhere it's been.
• Information Wants to Be Free - Information by its very nature desires to escape outside its imposed boundaries.
• Information Replicates into the Cracks of Possibility - The more universally resonant an idea or image or song, the more minds it will enter and remain within.
• Information Wants to Change - It evolves constantly into forms which will be more perfectly adapted to its surroundings.
• Information Is Perishable - Generally, its quality degrades rapidly both over time and in distance from the source of production.
• Meaning Has Value and Is Unique to Each Case - We assign value to information based on its meaningfulness. That value depends on the extent to which each recipient has the receptors (shared terminology, attention, interest, language, paradigm) necessary to render what is received meaningful.
• Familiarity Has More Value than Scarcity - Most soft goods increase in value as they become more common. Often times the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.
• Exclusivity Has Value - Exclusive possession of certain facts makes them more useful, but that value often degrades over time.
• Point of View and Authority Have Value - People are willing to pay for the authority of those editors whose point of view seems to fit best.
• Time Replaces Space - Information is generally more valuable the closer the purchaser can place themselves to the moment of its expression.
• The Protection of Execution - The best way to protect intellectual property is to act on it, not to sit on it.
• Information as Its Own Reward - Information is its own currency. It has intrinsic value, not as a means to acquisition but as the object to be acquired.

If you read Stanford law professor Larry Lessig's book
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, which is freely available for download and is "Creative Commons" licensed, you'll understand that this is a war and how high the stakes really are: humanity's creativity will either be stifled or unleashed, depending on the outcome. Or if you don't have the time to read a book, (even one that won't cost you anything), do at least listen to Larry's Free Culture webcast.

I've blogged before about the benefits to businesses of "embracing and extending" what's already out there. Why reinvent the wheel countless times over?

We "stand on the shoulders of giants" because of the free exchange of ideas.

If this is too idealistic for you, then from a practical standpoint, Open Source ensures you won't be "held hostage" by your web developer withholding web site source code as proprietary information — a common practice (but not here at Netconcepts!). Having the complete source code of your site, mitigates possible legal and operational code access problems and gives you maximum flexibility for future modification. I think one should continue to work with their web vendor because they are delighted with the service and quality of work, not because a transition would be too costly and would require rebuilding the site from scratch.

In addition, an Open Source solution is not constrained by licensing agreements, as proprietary software is. Open Source also offers security benefits because it's open to public scrutiny and subject to constant user testing. And of course there's also the reliability, adaptability and ease of maintenance of Open Source solutions. ( More from OpenSource.org on this.)

More free-to-download books on the subject of Open Source: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Open Sources 2: The Continuing Evolution, and Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project.

Vive la resistance!

Yahoo's just released a very cool new search engine called Yahoo! Creative Commons Search. With it you can search all the Creative Commons licenced content on the web. For those not familiar with Creative Commons, I've blogged about it before. In summary, it is an alternative to copyright, where some rights are reserved by the author, but not all. It's as quick and painless as can be for the author: you simply fill out this form that specifies how you want your material used out in the marketplace and the license is generated to place on your site. For example, your license can require attribution, restrict to only noncommercial use, allow for the creation of derivative works, etc.

There is a wealth of content out there under a liberal Creative Commons licence that will allow you to reuse and repurpose that content in your own projects. But finding that content used to be hard work. (Actually there was previously another way to search, but it wasn't as comprehensive, and it wasn't from a major search engine). Now it's just a search query away, thanks to Yahoo!

I can hear you asking yourself: "That's all fine and good, but what use will I have with it?" Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Collect interesting articles on a particular topic from different authors, write your own overview/summary to go with it, then assemble it all into an ebook and offer it on your site as a free download.
2. Take information relating to a particular company that you would like to land as a customer and arrange it into a scrapbook, then post it on your blog and ask readers to contribute to it further. Hopefully the prospective customer will take notice of your initiative and of your interest in them. If not, bring it to their attention. (What a great, new spin on the standard "cold call"!)
3. Augment your articles, white papers, etc. with excerpted content relevant to the topic you're covering. For example, if you wrote a white paper about "How Google Works," add Creative Commons-licensed photos and text descriptions describing their data centers.
4. Identify keywords that you want to rank well for and create a mini library of Creative Commons-licensed content about that keyword.

These are just a few ideas, and of course you have to abide by the terms of each content-owner's license. Idea #4, for example, would be considered commercial use if that library of pages were serving as landing pages to get searchers who find you to buy something. IMPORTANT: Don't just assume that because it showed up in the search results, it's licensed under Creative Commons. Some plain ol' copyrighted material will have undoubtedly snuck into the index. No search engine is 100% perfect. I didn't have time to test it out much myself, but it seems to pass muster with Tara at ResearchBuzz, so it must be pretty good!

An insightful reader on Slashdot commented that it would be brilliant if Yahoo! took the next step and launched a Bittorrent tracker that was limited to Creative Commons licensed content, with a centralized directory-style index. Bittorrent, if you aren't familiar with it, offers super-fast de-centralized file sharing on a file-by-file basis. It can be used to download legitimate files, like a trial version of a software program or music under a Creative Commons license. To get started, you need to have the Bittorrent software installed on your computer, and you'll need to have somehow obtained a Torrent file for a particular big file that you want. This Torrent file is tiny, and it contains information about how to connect with others who have parts of the file you want. But where do you find these Torrent files? That's where a tracker comes in. More on Bittorent later, in a separate post.

With that, I'll let you get on with using this new Yahoo! engine to "embrace and extend" to your heart's content.

Oh, by the way... If you want to learn more the fascinating story of copyright law (no, I'm not kidding! The way Larry Lessig tells it, it really IS interesting!), check out Larry Lessig's speech at OSCON, with audio syncronized with his Powerpoint slides. Larry is the brains behind the Creative Commons and an overall brilliant lawyer/author/blogger/Stanford professor.