Not quite free
I noticed that both Wikipedia and Firefox have been asking for donations recently. They're welcome to do this, but I couldn't help wonder if a few curmudgeons might be thinking: I told you so. Having wowed folks like Chris Anderson with their part in destroying any incentive for people to pay for encyclopaedias and web browsers, they've now discovered that they do, in fact, need money to provide the services that they do.
In The Logic of Collective Action (1971), Mancur Olson observes that most citizens say that tax-supported services are a good thing, and yet no government ever got by on donations. Had he been writing today, he might have said the same about encyclopaedias and web browsers. The problem for governments is that, without compulsory taxation, individual citizens are far too tempted to leave the paying to someone else.
Of course I noticed this because I myself launched Firefox and visited Wikipedia. It's hard not to when Wikipedia enjoys special billing on both Bing and Google, and, while I bought Opera once upon a time, I now couldn't buy a web browser even if I wanted to. (Of course I could donate to Firefox but why would I while Opera and Chrome aren't even asking for donations, and all three of them seem to have become clones these days?)
Both Wikipedia and Mozilla make pleas that illustrate the depths of their users' unwillingness to pay. According to Wikipedia, "if everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour". Put another way, Wikipedia has been reduced to this sort of begging by users' unwillingness to pay even a measly $3 for access to an encyclopaedia. But who led them to expect that the price of an encyclopaedia is $0?
Chris Anderson and others correctly observe that the marginal cost of electronic goods like web sites and software is very low, perhaps even "too cheap to meter" in the sense that setting up a metering and payment infrastructure for it might cost more than the good itself. But it isn't zero, and the fixed costs can be very high. "Free" can therefore only ever be part of a financially viable strategy for producing such goods.
What Wikipedia, Mozilla and others have achieved for very little money is nonetheless impressive in many respects. What we don't know is: how much more could have been achieved had some more funding been available? And how could such funding ever be raised while everyone expects these services to be provided free of charge?
