Stewart Brand

In Working in Public, Stewart Brand is the source of the duality that frames the book’s discussion of how open-source code is valued. Nadia Eghbal invokes the famous observation attributed to Brand — “information wants to be free” — to describe the pressure that pulls code away from being paid for. But she stresses the half of the quotation everyone forgets: Brand also pointed out that “information wants to be expensive.” That tension — between freely copyable code and the real, scarce cost of maintaining it — is the core paradox the book builds its argument around, exemplified by maintainers whose most impactful open-source work is the work no one will pay them to do.

Context: Stewart Brand (b. 1938) is an American writer and editor best known for founding the Whole Earth Catalog. His full remark, made at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, was that information simultaneously “wants to be expensive” (because it is valuable) and “wants to be free” (because the cost of getting it out keeps falling) — a tension he called the defining fight of the information age.

Where this appears

• Working in Public — source of the “information wants to be free / wants to be expensive” duality that anchors the book’s valuation discussion