Michael Masnick provides a link-filled road map to the star–studded fire touched off by Malcolm Gladwell’s critical review of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Masnick rolls in his own critique of the book and concludes:

Gladwell’s review…does Anderson’s book a disservice. It criticizes it because it doesn’t answer questions the book didn’t set out to answer, and then attacks the picture today without acknowledging the trendlines and the direction that they’re moving in. And, finally, it ignores the actual nature of the argument (this is happening) with a moral discussion (is this good?). That’s unfortunate. Where Chris’ book shines quite frequently is in laying out these trendlines clearly and in a way that will get you thinking. It may not answer all the questions about free, but it should certainly help those who don’t stop thinking at the zero to at least recognize the trendlines and get them thinking about how to deal with them. And that is, unquestionably, a good thing. As Chris did with The Long Tail, he’s taken complex economic theory and made it easy to understand in a compelling and highly readable format.

Like Masnick, I’m with Chris.