The Internet has long been a place where data was available for free. When I was in college people freely shared information with each other, posting it on newsgroups, bulletin boards and sharing it in email. As the Internet grew more commercial, it was at first assumed that companies would charge for information in the same way they had in the real world. Newspapers and magazines would have subscriptions that people would pay for and advertising would help sustain profits.
That didn't work, and many companies found that they needed to provide a substantial portion of their content online for free. Over the last decade, we have seen many companies struggle with this model, and even the slow decline of the offline model for some businesses. Micropayments failed for the most part, as did wholesale subscriptions that restricted all content.
However data, and information, has value. The New York Times has just decided that they will begin charging for their content, attempting to make a profitable business online. On one hand I think it's great to see this, and on the other hand, well, I like free as much as the next person. I don't regularly read the New York Times as a primary source of information, but I do occasionally check out links and the NYT produces great content. I'm just not sure it's worth a monthly subscription to me.
The tremendous growth of blogs and a more distributed publishing model has forced companies to rethink their business models. Some won't survive, and that's fine. Companies need to reset their profit margin expectations in the media world, and they need to find a way to package information that we find worth paying for.
Personally I think we will a subscription model, like the Zune subscription, will come about at some point. It will be a model that understands we won't consume all the content that is provided by one company and aren't willing to pay full price to each source. However we will pay for some amount of data.
We have a lot of information available for free about SQL Server, and I would like to see that continue, but I do hope people realize that there is value in paying for information about SQL Server when it's well packaged and presented.
Steve Jones
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