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Free != Free

What’s the difference between Gmail and Wikipedia? Both are very good free products, but Gmail is a for profit venture by a for profit firm. No one is making money off of Wikipedia, and yet its quality is similar to that of the best encyclopedias. Why are people putting out such high quality product for no (monetary) compensation?

Are Economists going to have to pick a new motto? Maybe we can talk about it over lunch.

Hat tip: Chris Anderson on Econtalk

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This entry was posted on May 19, 2008 at 23:24 and is filed under economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Free != Free”

  1. The Tinsmith Says:
    May 22, 2008 at 00:25 | Reply

    As Tyler Cowen puts it “we are not always motivated by money”. Google is a company of IT nerds and immigrant prodigies motivated by perfection.

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