Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi: Short for wireless fidelity

Fidelity: accuracy with which an electronic system reproduces the sound or image of its input signal

At many places, you have to pay for Wi-Fi. Paying for Wi-Fi. That is such a foreign concept to me. It’s almost like paying for air. Our society is slowly turning into a gift society, or perhaps already has. A gift society is one where money does not exist, it relies on people giving gifts to other people to keep the society going. One where services are exchanged, instead of money or goods. Then again, some services have become goods. People, especially younger people have found that sharing things is so much easier than buying things. I’m not going to condone the stealing or downloading of pirated software in this blog, but I will say that there’s a reason that it has become so popular. And there’s also a reason that Nine Inch Nails made so much money off of their “free” album.

We as people are an inherently stingy bunch. Whenever we can get something for free, we snatch it up. Which is why advertisers make it sound like they’re giving you money whenever there is a sale. I take that back, we are stingy unless the price is right. some people, when they go to a store, they will gladly pay $60 for a video game. Others wait until it becomes a “greatest hit” and it is then $20. But what if merchants allowed us to set our own prices for things. Of course, they would be allowed to set a base price, but the customer would be allowed to pay what they think it is worth.

The idea that you pay what you think something is worth has worked great for software. Look at the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) movement. If you go to sourceforge.net, you can see over 100,000 open source projects. You might be wondering why anybody would want to go open source. There are a few reasons that people use open source software. One reason is the price, open source software is free as in, “I’m going to give this to you.” The open source software that’s not free is usually very inexpensive. The second reason is that you are free to do whatever you want with the software. If you want to look at the code for the software, and take a small chunk of it to put into your own software, then you are free to, as long as your software is open source. Another reason is the sheer amount of support for open source software. While, it may not always be as quick as dealing with a large corporation. You will almost always get an answer from somebody that knows what they’re talking about. In the open source community, people help other people, because that’s what they love to do. In a large corporation, people help other people because that’s what they’re paid to do.

The whole mindset of open source software is sharing. I share something with you, you share something with me, and we’re all happy. If all software was open source, we wouldn’t have software piracy. If Adobe Photoshop was open source, there would be hundreds of versions of Photoshop floating around the Internet customized for your specific needs.

People, like sharing, this has been proven of the past 10 years with the famous politician, that we all know and love, inventing the Internet. There’s a good reason that the popularity of Napster, Kazaa, iMesh, Limewire, Bittorrent, and other peer to peer networks exploded. You can get any movie made in the last 30 years on the Internet for free now; many of them in less than 2 hours. If people didn’t want to share, they wouldn’t be sharing. If people wanted to pay for things, they would be paying for things. Businesses, such as Apple and Amazon, finally caught on the Internet is a viable means to sell things. But many businesses haven’t realized that this big thing called the Internet exists, have just recently realized that the Internet exists, or can’t afford to realize that the Internet exists.

For being the ones that control the world, big businesses move very slowly and then complain that the users/consumers are the ones that control the world. Sure, we don’t have all of the money that they have, but we do have more power than we realize. When the consumers start to use their power to change the economy, maybe big business will listen.

~ by jakeneumann on May 13, 2008.