Nonetheless, it is also clear that others, Bill Gates being the paramount example, have found that the best way to make their information valuable is to restrict access to it. No-one can question that Microsoft has created enormous value for itself and its shareholders, and even its critics should admit that Microsoft has been a key enabler of the ubiquitous personal computing on which so much of our modern business world depends. History has proven that each of their strategies can work. The question, then, is one of goals, and of the strategies to reach those goals. The question for publishers and other middlemen who are not themselves the creators of the content they distribute, is how best to serve those goals.
Information wants to be valuable.
Publishers must focus on increasing the value, both to its producers and to its consumers, of the information they aggregate and distribute. Because I publish books about free software, the people best qualified to write about it are often the authors of the software. Like scientists, those authors often have as their ideal the widest possible dissemination of their software and information about how to use it, rather than the greatest economic gain. They would like to see the documentation they write distributed freely along with the software. At other times, though, software authors see documentation as an afterthought.