Call it free, but it will cost you - washingtonpost.com

May 24, 2009

In the late 1960s, two groups -- the Diggers in San Francisco and the Yippies in New York -- began operating "free stores." These were places where people could come to get things they needed -- food, medicine, clothes and, in some cases, cash -- for free. These were designed simultaneously as parodies of, and alternatives to, the usual American materialism. The stores were not around for long, partly because people would come in and simply take everything they could put their hands on.

Now, four decades later, comes Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, whose new book proclaims that giving things away for free is the "radical" new business model of the future. According to Anderson, there are a variety of ways businesses can and should do this. They can charge for other goods and services to make money. They can use one class of customer to subsidize another; they can give away a certain type of service (such as photo sharing) and charge for another (such as storage space)...