Luis Villa posts - News Blog

July 5, 2007 3:47 PM PDT

Luis Villa has left a placeholder for a larger discussion on artificial scarcity. He has a problem with:

creating artificial scarcity, either through the use of patents, copyrights, or trademarks, or by allowing others to use trade secret and SaaS (software as a service) tactics to take data from the commons and then "proprietarize" it (make it proprietary).

I see his point, and agree, but any business depends on artificial scarcity of some kind. Or, rather, I should say instead that successful businesses are good at creating the appearance or reality of scarcity. Why? Because otherwise, the customer will take forever to buy something, even if they want it today. Right now.

This is actually one of the weaknesses of an open-source business model. ... Read More

Originally posted at The Open Road

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

Tags:: open source,; Luis Villa,; artificial scarcity,; Alfresco

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