The title is alluding to the famous quote "information wants to be free" by Steward Brand. The full quote famously includes the opposite as well, because information "wants to be expensive because it's so valuable".
Kevin Kelly as an early collaborator of Brand of course knows this intimately.
There is a wonderful and very insightful book on Brand, by the way, called "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner. [1]
[1] https://fredturner.stanford.edu/books/from-counterculture-to...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120329153458/https://www.paten...
I disagree. Value of an idea is on a scale too. Some ideas are more obvious than others because the evidence required to evaluate it is more readily available. Therefore, they are not terribly valuable since a lot of people can and do act on them.
Some ideas are valuable yet hidden from most because the context to evaluate them properly is not readily available.
Some ideas are valuable for some yet unpursuable because of existing systems and ideologies in place (aka Innovator's Dilemma)
In short, "ideas are worthless" became a meme but it's extremely distilled. There is a lot more nuance to it
I do know that once you publicly share an idea without somehow copyrighting it, people will run with it and the originator can get badly screwed financially by people talented at essentially intellectual theft and lining their own pockets who have an absence of ethics and are too stupid to see that screwing their source is not in their long-term best interest.
They nominally do economic development. I was happy to freely provide ideas but I did expect it to be a networking opportunity and a means to build my professional reputation and local contacts and thereby enhance my income.
That has not happened.
I quit going to meetings because I was tired of their abusive treatment of me and now they cyber stalk me and continue to steal my ideas, give me zero credit, etc so some local cretin and his awful bosses can pretend they are worth the money that the city pays them.
I am getting nothing out of this at all. They can't even be bothered to tell people where they get their ideas so my reputation would be enhanced.
I continue to be dirt poor. I have done everything in my power to play by the rules as I understand them and the result remains the same both online and off: People think I'm wonderful. They think I have great ideas. They also think I should do everything out of the goodness of my heart instead of for pay and everyone turns a deaf ear to the fact that I am dirt poor, going hungry and desperately need more earned income.
I have a real problem here, your platitudes not withstanding.
And if software eats the world, perhaps it will eat patents, too,
