Free (as Speech & Beer)
Some of the work I've been doing recently, coupled with a recent viewing of the Revolution OS DVD, keeps putting the following recurring phrase in front of my eyeballs[1]:
"free (as in speech, not in beer) software".
Two issues:
- Everyone knows what it free software is, even the evil proprietary people. So don't feel like you need to keep defining it, it just makes it seem new and utopian all over again .
- More importantly, why can't it be free as in speech and free as in beer? Where does this illogical bias against free beer come from, maybe this is why people feel like free software is unnatural?
[1] Regarding Revolution OS, save yourself the the 90 some-odd minutes, it's a fawning little number that doesn't ask many hard questions and hits about as hard as Antitrust or Hackers (yes, that faint noise is the sound of me violently vomiting into the nearest recepticle) --although the immediate crash of VA Linux in the final few minutes seems to have caught the filmmakers by suprise and is therefore unintentionally comical. It's nice to hear Stallman and Linus give voice to the OSS movement, it's just clear that the film is too interested in the feel-good part of the story and little else.