Unlimited Goods vs Scarce Goods in the Flex Compoment Economy

I read a lot of stuff over a TechDirt and one thing they often talk about is the difference between unlimited goods and scarce goods in the new economy. this often comes up in relation to music and recording artists. Music files, such as mp3s, are digital, and therefore unlimited goods. They cost next to nothing to reproduce and are easily spreadable. DRM is a push to make these digital / unlimited goods scarce, often at the expense of annoying users. If you've ever tried to play an iTunes purchased track on an mp3 player other than an iPod you'll understand why this is a problem.

With Flextras, I struggle to rationalize the digital goods vs scarce goods in my business model. I, in essence, created some DRM to protect the no cost developer editions of our Flex Components that we give out. I don't believe people will pay for just a swc file; there has to be some other benefit. Most companies in this space offer that benefit in the terms of higher access (AKA support) to the Flextras staff (still just me right now). I'm still trying to figure out the best way to make things work. If you have opinions, I'd love to hear them.

Some tweets this morning got me thinking about this. Rich Tretola tweeted that FlashDen was having a competition to create Flex Screencasts. I've never heard of Flash Den before now; and saw the announcement too late anyway. I understand they are a marketplace of sort. We (developers / authors) create something (components / screencasts / articles), and they provide a place to sell it, taking 50% of the cut. The 50% is on a sliding scale, so the more you sell, the more you keep.

Andrew Westberg responded to Rich by saying that their 50% fees seemed pretty steep for just providing a storefront. I've been doing these live Demo Q&A sessions every Friday at 1pm EST. During the first one, one of the attendees asked me if I would open up a marketplace allowing Flex Developers to sell their components to others. It is an interesting idea, but I've put no real thought into it. Would anyone be interested in a way to sell Flex Components like that? I know solutions exist in other communities I've lived in, such cfxtras for the ColdFusion community.

David Bigelow chimed into the conversation and said that FlashDen is diving into an empty pool. If there was a market for this sort of thing, Adobe would be there. From my perspective, as someone diving into the same big empty pool, I think Adobe is already there. Adobe is the exclusive reseller of the ILog Elixir components. I'm not sure how that arrangement came out, but Adobe wouldn't be making that commitment if they didn't think it filled some need. They also have their advanced data visualization package as part of Flex Builder Pro. In the Flex Builder 2 time frame, this package was available separately, but Adobe stopped selling it separately. Perhaps that does not bode well for the current market. Perhaps they just wanted to push people towards Flex Builder.

I believe if you can save developers time by providing them Flex Components that they would have needed to build from scratch, then you're in good shape as a vendor of Flex Compoments.

Then Andrew said there won't be a market until someone finds a way to protect SWC files. I know that sometimes meaning gets lost in the shortness of a tweet, but I am unaware of any market need that was created because of DRM. I'm very interested to see what the folks at Nitro LM come up with in terms of protecting SWCs. However, I don't believe the existence of such protection will create a market. It may create incentive for some developers to create commercial components. But if there is truly a need, some Entrepreneur is going to find a way to fill it, regardless of whether a DRM solution exists.