Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

Great library, seen it pop up here a few times. Slightly off topic, on the website it says:

> "free as in beer, speech & love"

...In what world is beer free? ;) haha

"Free as in beer" is a phrase (loosely coined by Richard Stallman) to indicate that something does not cost money. This is as opposed to "free as in speech", meaning that it comes with no restrictions.

Probably the same world where speech and love are free. :)

Roughly:

Free as in beer means you don't have to pay money to use it.

Free as in speech means you have freedom to use or modify it in any way you want

Free as in love means it will happily plays with all other software and systems

Ah, I could figure out the beer from the other two but I couldn't tell the speech-free apart from love-free.

They should also add "Free as in dom" meaning the word used as a political ploy to have people conform to your point of view

I've been on the internet for decades, and that phrase never sat well with me; Beer Money is a real phrase, and AFAICR I've always been required to tender a fee for the right to undock a beer container from the beer-temperature-control-apparatus or purge beer fluid from a heat controlled storage vessel.

Have you never been invited over and been offered to fetch yourself some beer from the fridge? It'd be weird for a friend to require you to tender a fee before doing so, and they'd also be quite annoyed if you started stockpiling the beer being offered to you and started reselling it. In my mind the phrase conjures the right frame of mind: "Hey! Check out this piece of code I've written, friend! Feel free to use it!"

That is a perfect way to put it for me to understand it...

Thanks. I feel obtuse for not getting that for so long.

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/31717/what-do-the-phrases-fr...

You have gotten many decent replies already. I think one thing that is missing is that the phrase talks about "free as in free beer". So it is not a statement that beer in general is free, it is a clarification that we want the meaning of "free" as in the phrase "free beer". In other words: At no cost. ("gratis")

This is in contrast to "free" as in "free speech", which is about freedom/liberty. ("libre")

Reply on news.ycombinator.com