The walls surrounding America Online Inc.'s well-manicured gardens are crumbling. In a move both risky and essential, AOL is abandoning its strategy of exclusivity and will free much of its music, sports and other programming to non-subscribers in hopes of boosting ad sales.

Jeremy Z said

Welcome back to the world of the relevant, AOL. It's a bold move, but it's about time you woke up and noticed the World Wide Web.

Can't help but agree, the walled garden approach is tried and tried again from forums to content networks to ISP's and it (surprisingly enough) seems to enevitably backfire in the end...