The Sega game machine is an example of the former principle. Had Sega been able to donate the code when they killed the product, it could have had an after-life. As it was, owners now have bricks.
Peter Eckersley calls fears of privacy and security that have made people lock their WiFi routers a “tragedy of the commons” and suggests the launch of an Open Wireless Movement to fight back.
I wrote something very similar two years ago, from Chengdu, where I was able to post stories only because of open wireless connections in a Chinese condo project. My hosts let us use a great apartment, but it had no computer, no Internet. Without the open connections of nearby units, which admittedly were on intermittently and didn't provide a ton of bandwidth, I would have been gone from the Web all that week. As it was, I delivered some of the most popular things I ever did write at ZDNet.