think you're liable for that? Check it out. (In most cases you are.) It just seems silly. I pay $1 to ride the subway downtown. It costs $300 to fly to NY and back (two hours in the air). A cab ride to the airport -- $40. My monthly rent is in the thousands. Medical insurance about $10,000 per year. Everything costs money. So does software. Don't fool yourself. If you don't pay, the bottom-line is that you lose. It may look like you're not losing, but you are. If you paid nothing for health care, you'd likely die sooner. If you pay nothing for software, you probably won't die from it, but you may lose data, you're virtually certain to waste time, and at some point, money. Dave Winer PS: A correction to Saturday's column . "Financiers invested, and gave back to the university so the next generation of technology entrepreneurs could be educated, nutured and launched." It wasn't clear that financiers invested in the companies started by the students, not in the work done at the universities. The bug was caught by Marvin Minsky of MIT. (!)