The New York Times 'gets it'

Oh, the pleasures in life: The New York Times now allows free access to almost all of their material. I used to spend lots of time reading the NYT online, and now that they have re-opened up their material (opinions, etc.) they are back on my very short Bookmarks menu (I use del.icio.us to manage most bookmarks: here are my personal del.icio.us bookmarks).

The NYT has clearly made the decision to go for more readers, and hope that advertising revenue makes up for subscription fees. In a small way, I do the same thing: after writing 14 published books, I put almost all of my writing effort into material that I simply give away for free - not totally altruistic: I earn my living as a consultant and having more people visit my site probably helps my bottom line about as much as book royalties.

While I understand that people working for companies like SAP or Microsoft might have a different viewpoint than mine because of where they see their personal revenue stream coming from, I believe that business and commerce works better when we all build on each other's open source projects, Creative Commons material, etc.