Richard Stallman and Future of Software Innovation

Start with all the reviews people write for Amazon (including myself.) No way Amazon should be able to legally claim these as its exclusive property; yet right now this review pile is probably their most valuable asset.

I don't think this solves the fundamental problem of the lack of "innovation" on the web, or in open source software in general, which is that most users don't want to, need to, or are even capable of, forking, modifying and redistributing their own software. Adding freedom doesn't necessarily mean adding innovation.

Sure, a decentralized and distributed web where anyone can view the "backend" and fork any site easily might be a more "free as in freedom" version of what we have now, but the reason there aren't a thousand Netflix competitors isn't just the closed nature of their backend code, it's that the problems of scale, rights management and distribution are hard problems, bandwidth and logistics cost money. There's far more to these sites than mere code.

The end result of such a system is still going to be centralization around a small number of services, not because proprietary gatekeepers are stifling innovation, but because that's the most efficient shape a market takes. There are always going to be vastly more consumers than producers.