Comments on
Conclusion
Thanks John… and you’re right this book doesn’t go into that. Part of the reason is that the short answer is actually pretty simple… most people who contribute to Free Software make their money doing something else: teaching, speaking, programming for hire, consulting, etc. There are a lot of different ways to imagine the value associated with Free Software than the issue of its value as an item of intellectual property.
A longer answer would be that not all economic growth in the IT sector comes from IP-based monopoly rent. A very large part of it comes from service-oriented aspects of the business. Just ask IBM, who employ a large number (hundreds, thousands maybe?) of people who contribute to Free Software on a daily basis… why would they do that? Because they are now a “service” company, not a software company. As such, they recognize both the advantages of IP and the disadvantages, and are big enough to try to extract value from both sides.
So yes… next book 
Thanks for the comment.
While I thought Two Bits was a fantastic book, one area where I felt it could usefully have gone further was to more seriously address the issue of how originators of software are to make a living from free software.
This is both important in making a sustainable free software movement and relates to the justification for the the Intellectual Property law in the first palce: the idea that originators of useful artefacts in science, art and technology deserve a fair return for the ideas they originate.
Although this is touched upon in the conclusion the discussion is not at all well developed: the next book perhaps ?
I didn’t actually mean to address the author in my comment. It just came out that way. I suppose these comments are meant to address fellow readers not the author.
I’ve only read the introduction and the conclusion so far, so I may be addressing something you’ve addressed elsewhere. I wonder what your take is on the “profound structuring effects” Free Software will have on the practice of ethnography. I know that Eric Luke Lassiter promotes and practices “collaborative ethnography,” where the people being researched play a large role in every step of the creation of the ethnography from planning to field notes to drafting to editing to publication. Did you consider opening up your text to that sort of pre-publication modifiability?
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