What’s wrong with Free Beer?
Freedom. It’s such a loaded term. It represents so many things: the ability to do stuff unfettered, letting the press say whatever they want, invading foreign nations to pass the time, a glorious ideal. “Free” means lots of things. Free as in libre... Free as in beer... Interestingly enough, they aren’t as different as you might think!
The concept of freedom is immensely powerful, and it is one of the pillars upon which our nations are supposedly founded—home of the free and whatnot. But it’s far from black and white. Freedom is a concept that western nations are pretty rabid about protecting (the media will tell you that terrorists threaten “our freedom” more than anything else). But, in fact, freedom can make us feel a bit uncomfortable if it encroaches on our ability to capitalise. Sometimes it’s best to leave the ideological stuff out and focus on the cash... if you keep rabbiting on about freedom, someone might notice we aren’t as free as we would like to believe, or get embarrassed by the zeal. And this got me thinking about the great free/libre software versus open source software debate. Why all the fuss? Why is RMS so insistent about “free”? And am I just being a fence sitter when I call it FLOSS?
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