Free the Data

Hmm.. and loose the thing that makes money and further more allow other to make money from that. Does not make a lot of sense, just like a lot of business models that did not make sense back in dotcom days. Even then the idea was to build the service and set it free. They will come, like my cute little service, and start paying for that once I ask for the money. Well we all know what happen to those services. We have to understand that this model does not work unless you are a very large company and the product/data you are selling out is not the core of your existance or does not bring any money to you. And that is why the products being opensourced by big company are products that have outlived their shelf life or are not making any money for the company.
That is why you need a syndication model in place. The content generators will sydicate the content and get paid for allowing other to get access to their data. The idea here is that, content/data can not be set free for a long time because creation of data takes time and money. Any model that sets the data "free" or uses free data to build services will be always in jeopardy. This is due to fact that such ideas look brilliant during the boom times or till you have not run out of VC's money and go down the drain as soon as the economy goes south.
This brings us to question why the almighty google and other service provides like msn and yahoo are providing data for free. Well we have to understand that, google is formost in the business of pattern recognition and not in content provider business. This pattern recognition business means that they need to lure the users using content to track and find general patterns which can help them build a system that can target ad and premium contents more precisely to the users. While other portals have to provide their premium content free since google is doing so or may be they are building the same structure behind the scene. So who knows when we will run out of free data!!