I’d agree that it is certainly frustrating to see things misexplained – although it does lead to the interesting question as to why those misexplanations occur. I’m not sure all of it is due to Friedman’s laziness.

One things is for sure: I should read (part of?) the book!

To your point Andrew, I don’t actually agree that BitTorrent has failed to communicate or market itself. BitTorrent is popular and successful; it’s now supported in Opera, Netgear recently announced a partnership, Warner Brothers did a deal, as did a bunch of other media companies. (By the way, over at over at rothbrothers.net there’s a great discussion about how those companies, while making deals with BitTorrent missed the real power of the protocol and P2P generally.)

BitTorrent, like Firefox, is actually a great example of an Open Source project backed by a brand and company working hard to market and promote it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_and_Freedom

It was written before the term globalisation became popular, but still has a lot to say on the subject (particularly the chapter on trade).

I wouldn’t pick at his anti-geek arguments too much, though:

” “BitTorrent is a Web site that allows users to upload their own online music libraries and download other people’s at the same time”. Wrong in at least two very important ways. Sigh. ”

Wrong in two ways, no doubt. Whether those ways are important is more questionable. The failure of BitTorrent, like much of open-source, is a failure of marketing and communication, not of technology or intent.

It’s the updated edition. You can definitely borrow it Nick. Links fixed by the way. Thanks.

I’d be interested in hearing more about it once your done.

btw, last two links are broken

Not that these people don’t have good ideas or a nice point, it’s just that the ideas are simple enough to describe in a paragraph.