My Linux-using friend tosses around phrases like “free as in beer” or “free as in speech” a lot. He’s tried to explain what they mean several times, but I seem to have some kind of mental block about them because I could never figure out what he was talking about… talk is cheap, and beer is never free in my experience. But I think I’ve finally gotten it.

There are two kinds of “free.” There’s free as in “costs less than a penny,” and there’s free as in “not forced to play second fiddle to a big beefy cellmate named Bubba every night.” The first I completely understand: I love writing software, and while I was teaching myself how to do so, I gave away my work for the sheer excitement of having people using it. The software projects on SourceForge all seem to be of that type. But software doesn’t have to worry about tossing someone’s salad, so how did that fit in?

As it turns out, there’s a very clear and simple explanation here. You’re free to run, study, modify, and give away copies of the software and it’s source code. This is what’s referred to as “free as in speech,” or the phrase that makes more sense to me, “free as in freedom.” Everything else (“free as in beer,” “free as in peanuts,” “free as in radicals”… um, strike that last 😉 ) refers to freely-available, as in something that has a price of zero. The two have a lot of overlap, but they’re not necessarily the same thing.

I still don’t get how beer is free, but as soon as someone enlightens me, we’ll be throwing a week-long party here. 🙂