What happens when the free stuff runs out?

I’m writing this on Word Press and it’s free.  I find I use Twitter all the time, I get most of my news from it and for some reason it always makes me laugh and it’s free too.  I also use LinkedIn quite a bit and dabble with Facebook from time to time but I must admit that the gloss has gone off that particular application for me (I can’t find anything very easily).  They are both free though.

The other day I had the pleasure to sit down and listen to a presentation by Tim Rylands, an evangelist for the use of technology in helping improve the education and life chances of young people.  He described a whole range of superb applications that are available, eighty eight of which were listed on a public bundle called Back to Their Future.  There were applications that allowed you to make cartoons using your own drawings or images you’d found on the web, that helped to expand your vocabulary by exploding words into mind maps, that took what you said and made an animated face talk on screen, that helped you to understand what lies behind basic programing and web design and, well I guess you get the point, they were all free.  

There is such as fantastic resource available to anyone who has a decent connection to the internet, as free as fresh air. 

But how can this last, how can it be sustainable?  Surely the people who are developing this stuff must be getting paid somehow, either through other jobs that they have or through some form of advertising revenue.

Does the rise of free learning applications represent a shift from state provided to globally provided education?  Will we end up with a two tier approach to software provision with an ever increasing divide between the cost of enterprise applications and the freely available consumer software?

All of these applications and, presumably, their ever growing content has to be stored somewhere and must be consuming vast quantities of energy.  According to McKinsey  ICT will be responsible for 3% of global emissions by 2020 (more than the airline industry) and as the world demands more and more energy then the price can only go one way.  There must come a point where the amount it costs to provide free applications outweighs any altruism and possible spin-off commercial value that they may have.  Like peak oil, there must come a point when the amount of free stuff starts to dwindle until it eventually disappears to nothing just because it is unaffordable.

The days of the truly free application must be limited.  The opportunity that they present should not be wasted.  We must learn somehow to capture the creative and inquisitive way of learning that is so effective with many young people and embed it in our educational system before the free door closes shut.