Arthur Chandler:
Any system of monetary exchange that would involve manipulating quotas, or translating them into a kind of tradeable commodity would, I think, be vigorously resisted by most MOO wizards.
Great! One of the main strengths of Virtual City seems to be to that its gets rid of the fascist heirarchy of "wizards", the virtual equivalent of factory managers in the old Soviet Union. (Caveat: these are just my impressions of the V.C. project, I'm not personally involved in it). Also the quote is "information _wants to_ be free", not "should be". Alas, it is easy to bottle up information by restricting it to small cliques of wizards. On the other hand, many of the world-wiser wizards may be able to use their MUD building skills to become Virtual City tycoons. There are probably plenty of wizards pissed off by politically-dominated MUDs, where access to resources has increasingly become a function of sharing beers with the "god" and less a function of contribution to the MUD. Wizards who are better MUD builders than beer buddies have incentive to jump ship and carve themselves out nice niches in a free-enterprise MUD. I suspect Virtual City, and net commerce in general, will evolve to where people buy and sell some information as services, and exchange other information freely. The distinguishing feature between valuable services and free information will likely be that services will be hard to copy, the end result of obscure, logically deep computations, providing information unique to each customer order or dependent on hard-to-duplicate phyiscal hardware. Freely copyable information typically will be sellable only a few times, and even then the sale price will depend on it being hot/unique news, uniquely valuable to a specific customer or temporary situation, or conveniently located. Old news, educational material, etc. will be free, barring fascist patent/copyright enforcement, but the customers will often pay for more convenient methods of distribution (eg smart filter services). Content _per se_ will want to be free, so one will not be able to generate revenue simply based on popularity of content. Content generation will not pay and will not dominate the economy. A good example is the distinction between the freely copyable GNU and X-Windows, and the for-pay consultation, customization, porting, help desks, etc. that have sprung up around them. Most of the effort goes into the latter: since people like to make a living, most of the economic effort will go into services rather than the exchange of free information. As bandwidth becomes cheaper the free info exchange will expand, but the incentive for creation is limited to self-sacrificing efforts or side-effects of government or consulting businesses or corporate charity (eg GNU, X, PGP). I look forward to something like Virtual City providing a free-market alternative to the heirarchical control of information (crypto key authorities, Unix file permissions model, MUD Wizard model, ad nauseum); I do not see it replacing the GNU free software model. Nick Szabo szabo@netcom.com