Towards a Free Matter Economy

Article. Towards a Free Matter Economy. By Terry Hancock. Free Software Magazine, Issue 7, October 2005.

URL = http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1192/pdf

Introduction

"Material products are getting “smarter” in that more and more of the value of a material product is contained in the information it carries, rather than in its material substance. R. Buckminster Fuller called this process “ephemeralization”[1], and it is one means by which the economics of matter—predicated on the conservations of mass and number—are becoming sidelined by the properties of information. Furthermore, both the capital and marginal cost of making products has trended consistently and rapidly down as manufacturing tools become both cheaper and more versatile, so that the capital cost of an object is increasingly not in the capital equipment required to manufacture it, but in the effort required to design it.

The business model of masquerading an information product as a matter product—by legally controlling the “uncomfortable” property of free replication—has been remarkably successful for a very long time. This suggests that we should consider whether the converse is possible: can matter-based products be masqueraded to act more like information products—eliminating (or hiding) the uncomfortable property of costly replication ? In other words, can we create a bazaar for free-licensed hardware design information and a matter product manufacturing economy which supports it? And can we do it without poisoning the free-design process itself? If so, we might be able to port the high utility, rate of innovation, and low costs found in the free software community to community-based hardware projects—an extremely attractive possibility."