• Is the freebie more than a silly premium, like the toy in a cereal box? There is no power in the gift unless it is crucial to your business.
• What virtuous circle will this freebie circulate in? Is it the loop you most need to amplify?
• In the long run, the unbounded support of a customer is more valuable than a fixed amount of their money. How will you eventually capture the support of customers if there is initially no flow of money?

Every organization harbors at least one creation–or potential creation–that can be liberated into “freedom.” This is often an idea with problems, particularly with its price: Should it be $69.50 per minute or $6.50 per box? The answer sometimes is: It should be free. Even if the idea is never actualized, my experience is that the very act of contemplating the free will inevitably illuminate all kinds of beneficial attributes that were never visible before. “Free” has long been a taboo price point. Perhaps because it has been forbidden, many low-hanging fruit are waiting to be plucked by giving the free serious consideration.

The protocommercial state and the triumph of the commons is in ascendance. It is no coincidence that increasing numbers of internet companies take themselves public before they are profitable. Investors are purchasing shares in a firm with protocommercial value. The old guard reads this as a signal of greed, speculation, and hype. But it also signals that many of the components of the gift economy–attention, community, standards, and shared intelligence–have to be in place before cold-cash commercialization can kick in. The gift economy is a rehearsal for the radical dynamics of the network economy.

As Stewart Brand says, the main event of the emerging World Wide Web is its current absence of a business model in the midst of astounding abundance. The gift economy is one way players in the net rehearse for a life of following the free and anticipating the cheap. This is also a way for entirely new business models to shake out. Furthermore the protocommercial stage is a way for innovation to fast-forward into hyperdrive. Temporarily unhinged from the constraints of having to make a profit by next quarter, the greater network can explore a universe of never-before-tried ideas. Some ideas will even survive the transplantation to a working business.

It’s a rare (and foolish) software outfit these days that does not introduce its wares into the free economy as a beta version in some fashion. Fifty years ago the notion of releasing a product unfinished–with the intention that the users would help complete it–would have been considered either cowardly, cheap, or inept. But in the new regime, this precommercial stage is brave, prudent, and vital.

When a sector of the new economy passes through the protocommercial phase, it is the opposite of the “tragedy of the commons.” The tragedy of the commons was that nobody took responsibility for maintaining the communal pastures that were the livelihood for the entire community. In the follow-the-free economy that seems to precede commercial activity on the net, everyone keeps the commons up because nobody is able to make a living from it on their own. Sophisticated software, as good as anything you can purchase, is written, debugged, supported, and revised for free in this “triumph of the commons.”

The most popular software used to run web sites is called Apache. It is not sold by Netscape, or Microsoft, or anyone. Apache, which has 47% of the server market (Microsoft has 22% and Netscape 10%), was written (and is maintained) by a network of volunteers. It is given away free. Apache, which is used by the developers of such commercial sites as McDonald’s, keeps getting better because the triumph of the commons rewards a completely open product: Anyone has access to Apache’s software source code and can improve it. “If you give everyone source code, everyone becomes your engineer,” says John Gage, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems.

The most popular operating system for web server workstations is not sold by anyone. It is a product called Linux, a Unix-compatible program that was originally written by Linus Torvalds, and given away for free. In the manner of building medieval cathedrals, hundreds of software engineers volunteer their time and expertise to refine and improve Linux, and to keep it free. Beside Apache and Linux, there are many other free software suites, such as Perl and X-Windows, maintained by a network of programmers. The engineers don’t get paid in money; rather they get better tools than they can buy, tools that can be easily tweaked by them for maximum performance, tools superior to what they can make alone, and tools that increase in network value, since they are given away.