the Internet allows an entrrepreneur to enter a market with a free offering because the costs of doing so are not astronomical. And most entrpreneurs who take this approach will maintain an attractive free offering of their basic service forever. But that doesn't mean that everything they offer will be free. That's the whole point of freemium. Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. But if you don't start with free on the Internet, most companies will never get paid.

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

The summit focussed mainly on open data, open access and open knowledge, although there were a lot of interesting ideas, many of which we have since tried to incorporate here (such as microfinancing via flattr). To whet your appetite, here’s the opening discussion.

The spirit of these principles is that there should be transparency to the methods, observations, data collection, data access, communication, collaboration and research tools.  Instead of limiting the sharing of the practice of science to publication of selected results, the entire scientific process should be exposed to potential users, collaborators and extenders of the work.