Free as in What, Exactly?

Free Software advocates have for a long time worked to draw a distinction between free of cost (“Free as in Beer”) and free of restrictions (“Free as in Speech” or as I prefer “Free as in Freedom”). The challenge stems from the fact that we use, in idiomatic English, the same word “Free” to refer to both concepts, whereas in romance languages (based on latin) there’s a clearer distinction between gratis and libre.

Optaros Beer, which was free as in freedom but not as in beer

Of course, as r0ml pointed out in a masterful OSCON presentation in 2008, we do have a corresponding word in English to libre – Liberal, or Liberty. Maybe if we’d been calling it “Liberty Software” or “Freedom Software” all these years there’d be less FUD.

Two recent posts crossed my blog reader on the challenge of value versus cost. Now that so many content creators are taking approaches similar to free software via unconferences and creative commons licenses, we need to remember that “free” in these case does not mean without value and does not have to mean without cost.
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BarCamp Boston 4

One of my favorite new trends of the last couple of years is the unconference movement and the *Camps, associated originally with BarCamp (an alternative to the invite only, highly exclusive FooCamp put on for “Friends Of O’Reilly”) but now extended to PodCamp, HeroCamp, TransparencyCamp, and even MooseCamp. (There’s also the inevitable CampCamp, though the name CampCamp was in use by another group since 1997).

Now BarCamp Boston 4 is coming up this April 25th and 26th at the Stata Center at MIT. Although ultimately the topics discussed are determined by who shows up, odds are that free and open source software, social media, voting, government transparency, robotics, hardware and software hacking, startups, and all kinds of topics related to openness, the web, and business will be common.

BarCamp Boston 4

I definitely plan to be there and I’d encourage you to register and attend, whether you’re a veteran or a n00b to the unconference world. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have a real conversation, in the absence of hugely expensive registration fees or overbearing sponsors.

Programming to the Twitter API (ReTweeter)

Presented today at BarCamp Boston on programming for the Twitter API, based on the retweeter project I did for SXSW this year. You can grab the slides or the code.

Went better than the WordPress talk yesterday, in terms of time – easier to describe Twitter (which everyone already knows) than to try to cover the WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the plugin I wrote to connect the two all in less than 30 minutes.

BarCamp Boston 3

Shimon Rura’s email today reminded me that BarCamp Boston is fast approaching again. Third week in May we should easily avoid the snowstorm which put something of a crimp in BarCamp Boston 2.

In case you’ve been somehow able to escape the increasing presence of *camps, BarCamp is one of the earliest and one of the best. It was on the occasion of BarCamp Boston (the original) that I started blogging, though to be fair you shouldn’t hold them responsible for that.

Here’s an hCalendar microformat of the event info:

Read more about BarCamp, view schedules, and learn how you can participate, by visiting the wiki at http://2008.barcampboston.org/.