rusty0101's Journal: Information has value.

Ok, we have all read it, seen it, and some people even profess to believe it. It being the phrase "Information yearns to be free!"

I am pretty sure that when you think about it, you will decide for yourself that there are two major flaws with this phrase. The first flaw is anthropormophising information. Information has no emotion, or desire. It really juse is, or is not. It want's for nothing, needs only data, and could care less whether or not your name is John Doe.

The other major flaw is that it is a missapropriate use of the word Information. Information is not "data". Information is the result of analyzing data and creating something of value from that data.

The fact that some city in western Montana may have 5600 citizens is on it's own, purely data. However that data along with the population and location of other cities all across the state, and across the country, can be used to determine where the population center is for the state and country. While you may consider that piece of information to have little value, it actually is used to determine a large number of decisions that affect you. It can affect voting areas, costs of transportation, and so on.

Raw data is available in abundance, and may or may not have value to the person it is relevant to. Examples of data that is changing in a linear fasion, includes how old you are in seconds. Every second the data changes, and generally makes no difference to the person it applies to. You do not celebrate 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc. seconds of age. Did you celebrate your sibling or child passing 1,000,000 seconds, 11 days, 13 hours, 46 min and 40 seconds after he or she was born? How about your 1 trilionth second of age, some 31 2/3 years after you were born. I didn't and don't really expect anyone else to either.

If I have the opportunity I will be happy to celebrate my 1,000,000,000,000 second. I don't really expect to however. I expect my navigation center to have failed by then.

Some data has much more specific value to you. The amount of money in your savings and checking accounts. Your birth date, credit card and taxpayer id numbers, as well as your drivers licence, and even your home address are examples. Some of this data has more value to you than it does to anyone else. Especially when that data is used to identify you. You are not generally keen to give that collection of data to complete strangers. Once collected, that batch of data becomes useable information. In some places a good portion of that information may be used to provide services you may find valuable. In other places, or with some people, that information can be (and all to often is) used to impersonate you.

At the same time, some data (missrepresented as information) is more valuable the less it costs. As an example, if a manufacture of a printer makes the signaling specifications for that printer available to people in the open source community, those people can create drivers for platforms that the printer manufacturer did not even consider when they created the printer. This opens up new avenues for sales, making the printer even more valuable.

Likewise for other interface devices, be they video cards, hard drive interface chipsets, or sound cards.

This does not mean that making that information freely available is always a good idea. In some cases the potential advantage due to more sales may be offset by another company certifying the drivers, and defraying the cost of the relevent tests with a contract stipulating that the specifications for the card will not be made public.

Again, this collection of data will have value to the manufacturer. It then becomes an economics question. At what point does the certification value exceed the potential for additional sales. The value of certifications is variable as well. I do not know how many people check a printer to see if it's drivers are certified by the system's manufacturer. Will knowing the drivers are certified affect a consumer's decision more than the dot density, or the number of pages per minute the printer will handle. I suspect that it is more relevant to a Linux user to know if some printer is compatible with the OS, than it would be to a Windows user. Unfortunately this is because the Windows user Expects the printer to work, right out of the box, which means that the driver needs to be one that Windows will come with, or that Windows will accept. With DRM comming down the line, printer manufacturers may very well be more concerned about their drivers being acceptable to Microsoft.

Why is so much of this about printers? Because (while I may be wrong) the open source or free software movements have their roots in a programmer being unable to modify a print driver that he recognized had a bug in it.

What I am stating is that there is value in the information that programers and hardware manufacturers work with. The actual development cost of a protocol is not always the only cost a manufacturer may wish to pass on to a developer if by doing so they have to break a contract with another business.

Granted, most of the development costs for a protocol will be defrayed by sales of the printer. However if you breke the agreement that Microsoft will test your drivers if you do not disclose the proprietary information, that means that to keep the drivers "good" the manufacturer will have to spend additional time, money and effort on their own to test the drivers on all of Microsoft's platforms. At the moment that would probably include Win98SE, Win2k, WinME, WinXP, Win2k3 and the two or three betas in the system. You may not think that is a lot, but add in application testing, and multi-application interaction, and it starts getting time and cost intensive.

That said, I love the idea of information being free. Go ahead and tell me your home address, age, gender, (include links to photos) age, birth date, and credit card numbers....

-Rusty