I think that much of this debate comes from a confusion about the meaning of the term "free". When we talk about Eprints software being free, the term "free" should take the meaning as implied by the GNU public license. In this particular meaning, one should think of it as "freedom", rather then "zero euro". More precisely, Richard Stallman, who is the main father figure of the free software movement, will tell you that free software is any software that has four freedoms attached.
freedom 0: You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. freedom 1: You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. freedom 2: You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee. freedom 3: You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements. Since Eprints is under the GNU public license, it is has a license attached to it that aims to protect these freedoms. Under the license, the producers of Eprints are free to charge per download, but they could not prevent another organization allowing zero-charge downloads. Free software is sometimes opposed to commercial software. That is a false opposition. Commercial software is written for a profit. Free software can also be written for a profit. For example mySQL a leading free relational database software. It is produced by a commercial company. I assume they make their money consulting others on how to costumize and use it, rather than on the software itself. I have no affiliation with the company so I am not entirely sure. I presume that Ingenta have similar things in mind. Plus, they will be running services to run archives on behalf of other organizations. The clients would choose to let Ingenta run Eprints for them, rather than doing it themselves. I have been a champion of free access since 1993, when I put the world's first free economics paper online, and I am the the founder of RePEc, a very large FOS initative for economics. I have had my fair share of arguments with Stevan in the past, but on this occasion :-), he is spot on right, there is nothing to worry about. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel