If you have some grass in your front yard, a lawnmower is a valuable asset—you know, for the five to 10 minutes of actual clipping it does during a two-week span. During the remaining 20,150 minutes of that time frame, however, the thing simply takes up space in the garage. And over the years, those minutes add up to quite a lot of non-usage. Meanwhile, your mower-less neighbors are fretting about the jungles of grass in…

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.

I had been watching the growth of the free and open source software movements for a few years, and I was thinking about people coming together and collaborating. What was really making that world possible is that people devised these licenses that allow, for example, programmers to share their work with other programmers, who could copy it, redistribute it, and modify it. This licensing method took away a lot…

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.

I had been watching the growth of the free and open source software movements for a few years, and I was thinking about people coming together and collaborating. What was really making that world possible is that people devised these licenses that allow, for example, programmers to share their work with other programmers, who could copy it, redistribute it, and modify it. This licensing method took away a lot…

If you have some grass in your front yard, a lawnmower is a valuable asset—you know, for the five to 10 minutes of actual clipping it does during a two-week span. During the remaining 20,150 minutes of that time frame, however, the thing simply takes up space in the garage. And over the years, those minutes add up to quite a lot of non-usage. Meanwhile, your mower-less neighbors are fretting about the jungles of grass in…