Ethics of freebies?

After a year now of steady progress with my building, scripting, and texturing skills I am at the point where I can soon turn out a steady stream of quality products, and my hippie impulses are driving me to offering some very nice freebies - both as promotional material and to help the community.

But ... this seems to be one of the areas where one can "do harm by doing good". On the con side, you have freebie resellers and the possibility of hurting existing content creators; some of whom are in low wage jobs or countries with low standards of living. I remember what its like where an extra $50/month really meant something when I was younger. I don't mind giving stuff to people who can have fun and make good use of what I give them, but I also don't like the walmart mentality some consumers have, expecting everything to be free or super cheap. Where is the respect for hard work?

So - I'd like to find out, where that dividing line between public service and exploitation lies when it comes to free content, and the unexpected consequences of this whole thing (and please please please please please no ultra-objectivist thread hijacking, please *crosses fingers*).

Well, you have to look at it this way: someone who is bound and determined to not spend and RL dollars in SL isn't going to buy your or anyone elses stuff anyway. There are enough freebies out there to outfit someone of this mindset quite nicely and there is nothing at all wrong with living a freebie-only lifestyle. Don't worry about those people, no one loses anything by giving them something free because they weren't going to buy anyway. For people who are willing to spend money to get things that they want, those are your customers and that is who you cater to.

It's my position that freebies improve SL in two ways:

Uno: They help make SL a fun place to play for folks unable or unwilling to mess with a RL to SL currency exchange or "premium" account.

Dos: Good freebies force sales goods to have to be a notch or two better, improving overall quality of "stuff".

Don't worry about ruining the economy with quality free items. When you give something away for free then the item rapidly loses its desirability because everybody else has a copy.

For me, even the most cool and expensive items can turn boring as they become more common.


Basically, the best and most desirable stuff is often the latest stuff.

If you are worried about finding hundreds of people selling your freebies for personal gain and making people pay for items they could get free, you could sell them free but without full perms. Copy only items can still help people learn to create and why should you allow someone to transfer something that is free anyway? Put a landmark in with the items so they know where to recommend to their friends

Go ahead and give them out free, but include where possible information that they ARE freebies. Include a notecard with them, and also embed the information in scripts or in descriptions. I suspect that most of the freebie resellers are too lazy to take those things out, or to figure out how to take those things out.

The "business in a box" and "resell" box scamsters will be with us for a while to come, until we manage to get the word out to newbies that they should be careful what they buy. I wouldn't worry too much about your stuff being packed in in those things; that market is glutted already.

-Prospero Frobozz (who gives away all the stuff he makes for free, including stuff he used to sell)

I would hesitate to give out freebies to every tom dick and mary who walks into your shop.

But... if you give a nice freebie to the right person it can create a good business relationship, make sure to make anything you give away or very low price is transfer (no copy/no mod) this way it can be passed along to someone else who may like your stuff and come back and buy more.. also include landmarks with any freebies you give.

-whyroc

I've worried a bit about this question too... and remain uncertain.I used to comfort myself with this argument, too, but there's another side of it: for folks starting out with the idea of making a few L$s creatively, it might be discouraging to find that the "barrier to entry" is higher because of good quality freebies. I've been able to almost convince myself that it's okay--there are plenty of things to create, so it's not that anyone has to compete with already-available freebies. But I'm not real confident about that.

I guess I'd never fault anyone for giving away freebies, but at the same time, I'm not at all sure there's never a negative impact.

It depends a lot on what you're giving away.

Giving away artistic items like clothes and textures has less potential for damage, because there's an infinite number of variations on art, and they do have the exclusivity argument mentioned already. Giving away free scripted gadgets, on the other hand, is more dangerous because there aren't an unlimited number of scriptable functionalities that people want. (There have been cases where scripted items were deliberately given away to prevent anyone making a profit developing them - with good intentions in some cases and bad intentions in others.) This is also similar with items like houses, where some people may only need to buy one.

The "barrier to entry" argument is a reasonable one, but it isn't just freebies that create a barrier to entry - it's low priced items that are sold, too. In fact, they create a bigger barrier, because a customer can take every freebie then spend L$ on the item you made; whereas other items that cost L$ force the customer to choose one or the other. Nobody is going to try and stop content creators selling quality items at low prices on these grounds - thus, you can't remove the "barriers to entry" by choosing not to give away freebies, and you shouldn't feel blamed for creating it. The "barrier to entry" effect is just the natural progress of capitalism in SL - unfortunate, but inevitable.