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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Hiring in a 2.0 World (smb7)

Boston Social Media Breakfast 7 was this past Thursday, on the topic of Hiring and Getting Hired in a 2.0 world.

Presenting were:

• Stever Robbins, consultant/executive coach and host of the Get-It-Done Guy Podcast
• Aaron Strout, VP of new media at Mzinga.
• Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications
• Chris Brogan, VP of strategy & technology at CrossTech Media

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Resources for Designing Online Communities or Social Web Applications

A couple of recent publications on designing / building social web applications that you should check out. More to say about each after the jump.

• Joshua Porter on the Bungee Line Podcast
• Chris Brogan’s Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
• Forrester Report from Jeremiah Owyang on Online Community Best Practices

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