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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The Knight Foundation News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal

(Quick Update 10/11/09 – see Zachary Seeward’s post about how the Knight Foundation is considering changing the terms of grants in the future, as well as Patrick Thornton’s piece on how the Foundation is assembling a team to continue working on the code base produced by the Everyblock team).

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, among many other philanthropic initiatives in culture, community, and journalism generally, has been running the Knight News Challenge since 2007. Its basically a grant competition, in which various digital journalism initiatives compete for a pool of grants amounting to $25 million total over five years.

One aspect which makes the Knight News Challenge unique – other than the size of the grant pool – is that the winning grantees are required to:

1. Use digital, open-source technology.
2. Distribute news in the public interest.
3. Test your project in a local community.

It looks like a fantastic strategy: encourage innovation, provide funding without forcing the grantees into short-term, must-build-immediate-ROI type thinking, and share the results with the broader community through open source.

Knight - Photo by Ruth L., cc-by-nd license

Two recent successful projects from Knight Foundation grantees – EveryBlock and Village Soup (which I’ve written about before in this blog), however, suggest there might be some gaps in the Foundation’s overall plan.

The core of the issue is this question: once the Knight Foundation funding is expended, what happens to the open source project the grant process mandates?

Do the creators truly create, engage with, and sustain an open source community around the code they release, contributing to and supporting the open source version, or do they “take it private”, leaving the open source seed to either take root and grow (or wither) on its own?

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Open Source versus Free Software from a Marketing Perspective

Via Sandro Grogans comes an interesting interview / discussion from http://initmarketing.tv/ about the use of the phrases “open source” and “free software” and the need to tailor the message to the audience.

Bruce Perens (co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) and Shane Coughlan (from FSF Europe):

Perens essentially calls the exclusion or downplaying of Richard Stallman a critical mistake made at the point of split between the “Open Source” and “Free Software” camps. They go on to discuss what the current challenges are in terms of helping people understand the core concepts of freedom underlying both approaches.

At risk of inciting a comments flame war, are “open source” and “free software” just two different names for the same thing, as Perens argues (even if you believe one name to be better than the other)?

Libre.fm and Free Network Services

Like many web-savvy music fans, I’ve been using Last.fm for the past couple of years. Now there’s a project, Libre.fm, which aims to bring the types of service last.fm offers into the world of Free Network Services.

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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.