Where can you find a free lunch?

I am here to tell you there is such a thing as a free lunch, and you’ll find it on the Internet. And therein lies a problem for some businesses.

Everywhere on the Internet, you can find free services. And many of them are produced through the remarkable “open access” process. In open access projects, unpaid volunteers contribute text, data, images or software from their own computers, and they usually are allowed – even encouraged – to modify the work of previous contributors.

Do you need an encyclopedia? Click on Wikipedia, at www.wikipedia.org. It is the world’s largest encyclopedia, and it is compiled by unpaid contributors. To find scientific papers, go to ArXiv, at www.arxiv.org. Do you want to participate in the open access movement by identifying craters on Mars? Click on http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top. The World Wide Web itself, which you will use to do all this, is also free.

The most exciting part of the open access movement is “open source” software development – unpaid volunteers develop software and make it freely available, along with its underlying source code, to anyone. For open source software, click on SourceForge at www.sourceforge.net or DistroWatch at http://distrowatch.com.

Open access projects often compete successfully with long-established businesses. Wikipedia attracts people who might otherwise buy the Encyclopedia Britannica. The open source Linux operating system competes with Microsoft Windows and has fans everywhere, including in Maine schools. David Trask of the Vassalboro Community School says that by switching from Windows to Linux his school annually saves roughly $8,000 in licensing fees to Microsoft, and has used the savings to buy new energy-saving computers. Trask also says that about 100 Maine school districts use Linux, either in the classroom or for internal recordkeeping.

How far can this go? Will nonprofit open access organizations start competing against businesses outside the world of information technology? Francis Heylighen of the Free University of Brussels says it is theoretically possible that “most economic value [will] eventually be produced under an open-access system.”

I beg to differ. Don’t hold your breath expecting free lobsters or free life insurance. And General Motors should not count on free steel, aluminum, or tires for its SUV assembly lines.

The future of the open access movement is limited because it needs very special conditions. Yochai Benkler, of the New York University School of Law, sees great promise in open access but acknowledges that these conditions are uncommon, yet essential for the open access model to work.

One condition is that costs to volunteers must be low, as is the case when they write Wikipedia articles or develop software. Volunteers already have their own computers and do not need to rent office space. Second, the products produced under open access usually are “non-rival”: if you send me a computer program you’ve developed, you can keep using it – we are not rivals for the program. But if you give me your lunch – and here I mean a real lunch – you won’t have it. Third, as Benkler notes, many open access projects thrive only because their tasks can be broken down into many components, each small enough to be executed quickly by one volunteer, and because the components can be integrated into the overall project at low cost.

These special conditions usually are not met. In lobster fishing, for example, the costs of boats and gasoline are high – and you cannot give me your lobster and eat it too.

Also, the long-term future of open access may be threatened by corporate efforts to enforce software patents. Microsoft claimed last week that open source software, including Linux, violates 235 of its patents. Patents give companies exclusive rights to use the software they develop and to license it for fees to others, providing incentives to develop new software. The open access movement opposes the granting of software patents because this limits programmers’ access to old software in order to study and improve it.

The future of open access also will be complicated because open access work is increasingly intertwined with corporate work. Corporations are entering the open source world, and open source organizations are setting up for-profit subsidiaries. IBM is reportedly contributing $100 million a year to developing Linux and other open source projects. SourceForge is now owned by a for-profit corporation. On the other hand, the Mozilla Foundation, developer of the free open source Mozilla Firefox browser that competes with Internet Explorer, has established a for-profit subsidiary to market its open source products.

It is hard to guess whether these trends threaten the long-term future of the open access movement or demonstrate its vitality and ability to influence the corporate world.

Right now, though, the movement is thriving. Wikipedia now contains 1.8 million articles, while SourceForge hosts 149,000 open source projects. The open source Apache software runs almost 60 percent of the servers that make Web sites available to Internet users.

So enjoy the benefits of our amazing, rapidly growing open access movement. Meanwhile General Motors and lobstermen need not be worried, while Microsoft, IBM and other information technology firms must figure out when to fight the movement and when to collaborate with it.

Edwin Dean, an economist and seasonal resident of Vinalhaven, writes monthly about economic issues.