Free, As In Beer.

Knightmare had a pretty good post on his blog the other day and it really made me think. I understand his concern about Linux "zealots" (we call them 'fanboys' here) and share it to some degree. However he has made a statement that I do not agree with and it may be semantics so if it is please forgive me.

He mentions the labeling of things as 'non-free' and it appears that his bothers him. The word 'free' in the software world has several meanings and when we are talking about 'open source' software and GPL software, people have to be careful how the term is used. I know be cause I have been corrected on this myself.

When a company offers you software for free, it is free as in "free beer". What I mean by that is you can consume all you want and the person who gives you the free beer can cut you off whenever they like, so you enjoy it while you can. Many pieces of software are handled this way to get people interested in it. 'Freeware' as we are used to seeing it in the Windows world is usually this. Adobe Reader as an example is 'freeware'.

Now the 'free' that the Linux community (the GPL people specifically) is concerned with is "gratis", free as in 'free speech'. It is given without any strings attached. You can include it in distributions, decompile it, alter it and in some cases, sell it. Now if we use Adobe Reader as an example as we did earlier, we cannot: decompile it, alter it, or sell it at all. Adobe holds the copyrights to it. Evince, for example is 'gratis', do with it what you please.

Now the Linux purists are upset that certain companies will not release source code to drivers. The reason they are upset is that they think that certain softwares should be free. The OS and hardware drivers are core for this and the purists think this should be made available to them. If they want to stop offering their support for Ubuntu, then so be it. Ubuntu is trying to bring Linux to the masses and if that means using 'free' (as in beer) drivers, I do not mind. It will make certain things easier on all of us. However I stand by the choice to used the language 'free' and' non-free'. It tells me a lot about the software I am using To be fair, most Debian distros have repositories for this. They usually will give you the disclaimer that the software will not always be 100% free to use any way you want, but if you are just installing it and have no plans on recompiling or repackaging it.


Another area that we have to be careful in is copyright infringement. Micorsoft I am sure pays royalties to include the codecs and drivers they bundle with Windows. If a company does not pay these royalties, then they cannot legally package them with their product. One interesting news item that comes to mind is Microsoft and Adobe. For the past several years, many freeware utilities offered the ability to export to pdf format. Mind you they could not allow editing of the pdf's, but they could offer the ability to export because they were not charging for that and if they did, they were paying royalties to Adobe. MS Office has never had the ability export to pdf because they refused to pay Adobe royalties and they also wanted to have the ability to edit the pdf's. That has changed somewhat with Office 2007, which now offers a free download to allow you to save your word docs as pdf's. Way to go Microsoft! You finally caught up to the rest of the world.

Also, ever wonder why you find freeware to edit a pdf file DIRECTLY? That is because Adobe has a patent on that. If you want to edit a pdf, you have to export it to an editor make the changes and export it back. Hmmm double exporting...I wonder how much of the original formatting is lost... :-)

Yep, Knightmare has really dug in with his testing and I am proud of him. With a little more research he will be a good person to go to with basic Linux questions. He has already answered some of mine regarding issues that I have never delved into, so when when I am ready to dive into those areas, his blog will be used as a resource.

Thanx, Duck.