Made it in Saturday for the opening of Podcamp Boston 6. (After a few working weekends in a row, I couldn’t do two full days so I just came in for Saturday morning).
While I was only able to catch three sessions, each would have been worth the trip on it’s own. All three were led by dynamic, engaging, even charismatic presenters who clearly know their stuff and know the Podcamp audience.
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Podcamp Boston (6) is this weekend (Sept. 24th and 25th) at the Microsoft NERD center.
Here’s the schedule (which they haven’t yet published except as a google doc):
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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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