Information Should Be Free

Almost everything I know about building interfaces, I learned for free. Nobody charged me to open the inspector on a site I liked, or to read the source of a component library, a post where someone explained how they built a menu or a thread where someone broke an animation down frame by frame.

I think about that a lot, because it didn't have to be that way. Every one of those people could have put what they knew behind a gate, and some of them would have made money doing it, but most of them didn't, and I'm doing this work because of it.

So I believe information should be free, and I mean it less as a slogan than as something I owe back.

Most of what I know didn't come from a course but from a browser.

I'd find a site with a detail I loved, open the developer tools and read how it worked. I'd find the open source library behind a component and go through it file by file until I understood why it was written that way. I read documentation like it was a book, watched conference talks from people I'd never meet and followed people who posted what they were working on and, more importantly, how.

None of that was organised, just a pile of free things that added up to an education, and every single piece was given away by someone who decided that what they knew was more useful shared than kept.

The reason I think information should be free starts with something simple: when I give someone an idea, I still have it.

One person learns itEveryone after them

One dot branches into two, then four, eight and sixteen, while the first dot stays as it was, and then the tree fades and grows again. Most things don't work like that, because if I give someone my chair, I no longer have a chair. But if I explain how I time a menu, now we both know. They can explain it to two more people, who can explain it to two more, and nobody along the way is any poorer for it.

In Pay It Forward, Trevor draws his idea for changing the world on a chalkboard: he helps three people with something they can't do by themselves, and instead of paying him back, each of them helps three more, which makes nine, then twenty-seven. Some of the class call it stupid, and his teacher calls it overly utopian. Thomas Jefferson put it well, more than two hundred years ago. Someone who gets an idea from you receives it without lessening yours, the same way someone who lights a candle from yours gets light without leaving you in the dark.1 That was true with letters and printing presses, and it's even more true on the internet, where the cost of a copy is effectively zero.

When something costs nothing to share and grows in value the more people have it, keeping it locked up is a choice to make the world a bit smaller than it needs to be.

A paywall doesn't pick the people who want to learn most, but the people who can pay.

Free to read

Readers move right along two lines. Behind a paywall, most stop at the wall and fade out and only one in four gets through, but on the free line every one of them passes. Those are very different groups. The person who'd get the most out of a good explanation of springs might be a student, someone in a country where a course costs a month's rent or someone with a job that has nothing to do with design who's teaching themselves at night, and the gate stops them first.

I know the gate gets put there for real reasons, because people need to make a living. But every time knowledge goes behind a wall, someone on the other side doesn't learn it, and nobody finds out what they would have made.

Free doesn't mean the work has no value. Writing something clear takes time and building a tool takes longer, so the people who do it deserve to be supported, and I think we should support them more than we do.

Stewart Brand said information wants to be free, but the full quote is more interesting. He also said information wants to be expensive, because the right information at the right time can change your life. Both are true at once, and the two pull against each other.2

The way I square that is to separate the knowledge from the work of applying it. What I know about motion should be free, but my time, a tool I spent a year on and the hours it takes to apply that knowledge to someone else's product can cost something. Selling a product is fine and so is charging for time, but hiding the understanding is the part I don't want to do.

Free also doesn't mean free to take credit, so when I've learned something from someone, I say so. Sharing works because people keep giving, and people keep giving because they're seen, which makes attribution the way to pay for something that has no price.

Everything I write here is free to read, with no email to hand over first and no part two behind a subscription.

Every page also has a plain Markdown version, so you can hand it to an agent and have it apply what's here to whatever you're building. The skills I use with coding agents are open source, and userinterface.wiki is free and will stay that way.

If something here helped you, there's a link to buy me a coffee at the bottom of the page, and the point is that it's optional: the support should come after the value, from people who want to give it, not before the value, from everyone who wants to see it.

The thing I didn't expect is how much of it comes back.

When I shared how I built something, people would write back to tell me a better way to do it, or build something on top of it that I'd never have thought of, and then share that. The person who learned from a free post five years ago is now writing their own, and I'm learning from them.

Knowledge compounds when it gets passed around, and I'd rather be one of the people passing it.

I learned everything I know because people gave it away, and this site is my attempt to do the same.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813. ↩

Stewart Brand, speaking at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, as printed in the Whole Earth Review, May 1985. ↩