Why Free Flies - and Galileo Doesn't

Nice little piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian today that pulls together a bunch of disparate stories (including my Alfresco profile from yesterday's edition of the same) to explain why giving stuff away makes economic sense. I particularly liked the following:

What I do find ironic though about the (very laudable) OpenStreetMap model is how it's acquired. The key element is Global Positioning Systems, aka GPS, aka sat-nav. GPS didn't just fall into the sky. It cost a lot of money to put it up there, and a fair bit to keep going - about $400m annually, including satellite updates.

But here's the thing about GPS: it's free to use, and in the short time that it's been available outside the military, its use has exploded. Figures for the value of the market are hard to come by, but EADS-Astrium estimates (in the graph at the end of the link) that this year it's worth about €40 billion. That's a hell of a multiplier on something that you give away for free, given a comparatively small investment.