But there is, of course, an alternative economy trying to grow up. With respect to software, it's happened already. With respect to software, it's already been demonstrated that in the real world in which we live, zero-marginal cost products that are collaboratively developed in the net and that have measurable functional characteristics - so that one can say, in an objective way, this is better or worse - are better produced anarchistically than they are in a proprietary mode. This is what the development of GNU, Linux, and all the rest are about. You can have more people doing more work, contributing more rapidly, fixing more bugs at the point of discovery, and you have Lamarckian evolution of software so that all favorable characteristics are inherited and therefore you get very rapid development. That's why the development curve on free software products has been so staggering to commercial producers who didn't know how these things could have roared up out of nowhere. -- Eben Moglen, http://www.immaterial.net/page.php/44/