Published on Thursday, September 9 2010
Photo by Brian Arnold - http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianarn/265152959/
SixApart recently announced that they will be closing Vox, their hosted blog service, at the end of September. Earlier this year, Ning announced it would be moving to a “paid users only” model, leaving many communities looking for new homes online. What’s a site owner to do when free (as in beer) services disappear? Look for open source replacements, of course!
WordPress and Drupal
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Published on Friday, October 2 2009
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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