In the course of both my job (programming) and one of my hobbies (also programming) I regularly have to search the net to find the solution to a problem: maybe a bug in a third party tool or how to do a particular algorithm. Increasingly and inevitably the first result in google links to www.experts-exhange.com. Or as we at work call them, Expert Sexchange.

EE for those who don’t know is a forum where you can go and ask a programming related question and have it answered by an ‘expert’. Quite how well qualified these experts are, I don’t know, but what I do know is that to read the solutions to any questions you have to subscribe and to subscribe you have to pay. I can think of few other places like this on the internet. Most other places are free and some, unlike yahoo answers, even get people with a few brain cells posting to them.

One of the internet’s greatest features, if not THE greatest, is the free sharing of knowledge and information. People will willingly share source code and solutions to people they’ve never met and ask nothing in return except that they too can get solutions and answers. It works like barter – one day you’re asking for information, the next you’re giving it. Quid pro quo. Sites like EE kill this mentality by only sharing information with those who can afford to pay for it, keeping those who can’t in the dark. If all places were like this it would be like medieval times where only the very rich (and the clergy) could read or write, when knowledge was exclusively the domain of the wealthy.

So if you subscribe to Expert Sexchange I urge you to stop. Boycott it or whatever until they realise this feudalistic mentality is not what the internet is about!