On Thu, 2002-12-26 at 20:41, rob wrote: > What does this mean and why do I keep seeing it in connection with any > discussion of Linux?....."free (as in beer)"? > > Thanks, > Rob >
I'm not an expert on licensing, but since the experts are still recovering from all that spiked eggnog... Free as in Freedom = you can do whatever you want with this product. Ultimate expression is probably BSD license, followed by all sorts of derivatives like MPL and PAL and APL, followed by GPL (since it explicity says what you have to do upon distribution, it is less free). Free as in Beer = you may use a copy of this product without giving the producer any money. Lite versions of shareware, adware, and market-seeding efforts like MSIE go here. Imagine a Venn diagram of these two circles, with freely downloaded distributions of open source operating systems in the overlap area, and you've got a pretty big swath of the software world. Surround it with an ocean of software that isn't free in any sense, and then imagine it as a very thin horizontal layer. Below it is a bottomless pit of mud and broken machinery, which is old software. Above it is a nebulous sky of things that might someday be possible. That's the entire software world -- Pythagoras, eat your heart out :-) Still got plenty of eggnog here, -- Jack Coates Monkeynoodle: A Scientific Venture...
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