TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Where information comes from From:"Eric J. Ray" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 20 Aug 2001 19:21:08 -0600
I've been watching the discussions on intellectual
property rights go by for a while, and have deliberately
not stepped in to throttle them, mostly because they're
sorta relevant (in a roundabout way) but also partially
through morbid curiosity about how people would react
to some of the points made.
My take? Here goes:
Information is _NOT_ free (in any sense). Take TECHWR-L,
for example.
Messages on the TECHWR-L List
Any message posted to TECHWR-L, although
it arrives in email boxes at no cost to the recipients,
costs _real_ _money_. First, there's the value of the
time of the poster (donated, in this case) to provide
intellectual property for the use of the community
as a whole. Does this have a value? Sure it does.
If I spend 1 hour solving a problem, then post
the answer to the list, I've donated the value of
one hour of my time. If you would otherwise have
had to call 1-800-SUPPORT-ME for $100/hour to get
this information and could not have done your work
without it, then the value of the information to
you is probably on the order of $100 or more as well.
Second, there's the cost of the mechanisms required
to get the message to your inbox:
* computer hardware (not cheap)
* computer software (not cheap)
* system administration time and effort (costs
hidden because I do the system administration,
but I could be making $200/hour for doing the
same system administration work as a contractor,
and I spend upwards of 10 hours/month on it--
upwards of _100_ hours this month).
* bandwidth for delivering the mail message. On
a per-message basis, it's negligible, but when
you multiply the bandwidth of a 1 kbyte message
times 5000 subscribers, times 100 messages per
day, times 22 business days/month, and you've
suddenly got 11 gigabytes of data coursing through
the wires, and that's not cheap. (Of course, the
average message is closer to 4 kb, and there's
measurable traffic on all days--not just business
days--so figure 44-50 gigabytes as a more realistic
estimate. Every month.)
Oh, yes, and add in the little bits of stuff like
message archives (disk space and more bandwidth) and
private news servers (disk space and more bandwidth),
and you end up with a decidedly non-trivial total.
Articles and Services on the TECHWR-L Site
When someone wants to find out about a tech writing-related
topic and heads to the TECHWR-L site, the information is
freely _available_ to anyone seeking it. That said, that
information is also very much _not_ free.
Virtually every article on the TECHWR-L site represents:
* A check written out to the author of the article
for the rights to publish the article on the TECHWR-L
site. Sometimes it's $20, sometimes it's $500, but
there's nearly always a payment involved.
* Deborah's time to edit (often iteratively for several
passes), ensure that there's a contract to protect
the author's rights--and ours--, and publish articles.
Again, this is time that has a substantial commercial
value.
* Computer software, hardware, bandwidth, and administration
time to make the information available. (See above for
the specifics, but with well over 350,000 page views
each month, it's also non-trivial.)
Additionally, of course, free resources like the Calendar,
Directory, and Employment Central take time and effort
(thus money) to develop and maintain.
This scenario, of course, can be generalized to _every_
resource on the Internet that's available at no charge
to consumers. Even every open source project masks the
contributions of intellectual property as well as
cold hard cash from the companies that make servers
and bandwidth available.
So, if information is _not_ free, how is it that you can
use it without having to pay a bill?
* Because of TECHWR-L sponsors (those tag lines at
the bottom of your TECHWR-L messages and the badges
at the left side of all TECHWR-L site pages) who
help to defray those costs.
* Because of TECHWR-L advertisers in the Premium Daily
Announcements.
* Because Deborah and I think that supporting the
technical communication community is the right thing
to do, simply because we're in a position in
which we can help make a difference.
Popular opinion, as expressed by some on TECHWR-L,
notwithstanding, I can tell you that information is
positively not free. It's not even close.
To anticipate a question--actually posed a couple
of weeks ago when we announced the server move--
about finances: Why don't we charge for access?
Because we don't think that it's appropriate to restrict
access to the information available through TECHWR-L
based on ability to pay. It's simply not the right
thing to do.
The generosity of TECHWR-L sponsors has allowed us
to build and develop this resource for the entire
community, including those who cannot pay as well
as those who don't see intellectual property as something
to pay for.
Obviously, this discussion--and the implicit devaluation
of a resource that Deborah and I have spent thousands
of hours and thousands of dollars on over the years--has
hit some hot buttons with me. While I'm not suggesting
for a minute that everyone should share the same values that
Deborah and I put on intellectual property, I will tell you
that we feel strongly enough that there's a tangible value
to intangible products that we've sent unsolicited checks
to open source developers to compensate them for their
time and effort in creating software that we use.
*** Deva(tm) Tools for Dreamweaver and Deva(tm) Search ***
Build Contents, Indexes, and Search for Web Sites and Help Systems
Available now at http://www.devahelp.com or info -at- devahelp -dot- com
A landmark hotel, one of America's most beautiful cities, and
three and a half days of immersion in the state of the art:
IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
