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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> free as in speech, not beer

I can never remember which way around this is. I think the "beer" is supposed to be free in the monetary sense and "speech" is supposed to be free in the rights/liberty sense, but the analogy doesn't actually convey this:

- Speech is normally both monetarily free and (in certain places) a right

- Beer is normally neither monetarily free or a right. But may make you "feel" free, which is another sense entirely.

Is this a cultural reference I'm missing?

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It’s not as complex as you’re choosing to make it. When someone tells you, “There’s free beer at Oktoberfest,” is your first thought that the beer has no monetary cost, or that the beer is unencumbered by particular legal restrictions?

Now someone tells you, “There’s free speech at Oktoberfest.” Is your first thought that there’s no monetary cost to expression, or that the expression is unencumbered by particular legal restrictions?

(Happily, Oktoberfest has both.)

Think of them as the _slightly_ longer "Free as in 'free beer' " and "Free as in 'free speech' ". When beer is described as “free,” it’s understood to be gratis. When speech is described as free, it’s understood to be libre. These are used as examples for more ambiguous situations, since software can be one, the other, both, or neither.

How do I get free beer at Oktoberfest?

You don't, but the point is that if there was "free beer" at Oktoberfest the meaning would be unambiguous.

what is free software?

pssst - there are two different words in German for these concepts

Free as in beer, as when one refers to 'free beer' it's one that you don't pay for. When one says 'free speech' it's one that allows you to do what you want.

Former is gratis, latter is libre.

> Beer is normally neither monetarily free

TBH the main place I've seen the phrase "free beer" is a Simpson's joke: people stand in front of a sign saying "free beer", but after Homer drinks many cups, the sign is revealed in full to say "alcohol-free beer, $5/cup".

It's understood that beer normally costs money, so the setup of the joke is that "free beer" is understood without explanation as "beer without costing money".

Beer was once given away at taverns so people would stick around for the food, which had a price adjusted to make up for the beer. Freeware uses this model.

This also works in the inverse. The kimmelweck sandwich has its orgins in the pubs of western New York. Some gave the sandwich for free, and it was so salty that incentive was created for adding some pints to the tab.

The first amendment to the US Constitution provides very strong protection for the right to free speech. Presumably that is the origin of "free as in speech".

Right, but what about "free as in beer"?

If I buy you a beer, that's free beer for you.

Which, unless you're my friend, prompts the questions "what else is in this beer" and "what's in it for you." I believe that to be a deliberate choice in the "free as in beer" analogy.

"Free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer" is just expecting you the hearer to understand that while event advertisements might prominently feature the words "free beer" as an exciting statement that beer is being given away for zero cost to drive interest, zero cost is not the sense in which "free" is being used in "free software"

Do you think that the free software movement would have adopted "free as in speech" if the US was hostile to free speech?

Certainly, but it would have started somewhere that wasn't hostile to free speech. The Netherlands 20 years from now, maybe, or Korea when the computer is invented 150 years in the future in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.

Probably you're overthinking it...

"free as in speech, not beer":

"free speech", the right to say what you want without legal restrictions from the state

"free beer", beer you don't need to pay for

Nothing to do with beer making you "feel free" (?) or whatever

Then again, free speech is not about being able to modify speech, release your own version of another's speech, and so on (e.g. the US has "free speech" but MLK's dream speech is still copyrighted).

Perhaps a better slogan would be:

"Free as in free sex, not beer"

And if the slogan wasn't meant for corporations too, and wasn't coined in the puritan 80s/90s, it might have been...

Maybe something more comprehendable would be “free as in Postfix, not Gmail” in that anyone can freely implement an MTA or use existing FOSS, which is different from using for free Gmail, Facebook, first 3 months of AOL, first 10 albums from Columbia House, …

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/28036/its-steal-how-colu...

The culture reference is to commercial goods (like beer) being given away at zero cost as a promotion. (“Beer” is probably not the best example but is conveniently terse; for Boomers, “toasters”—in reference to bank promotions—might be more culturally relevant, for younger generations “-to-play” in reference to F2P games might be, but neither rolls off the tongue as well.)

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