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Comment by silveira | Hacker News Reader

> Our intention is that Raspberry Pi Connect will remain free (as in beer)

So not free as in Freedom, no source code?

I asked about self-hosted relays on the forum [1]. Right now it doesn't look like they have plans to open the source code behind the actual service. Not sure if that's a 'no, never', or a 'we didn't think about it', but it would be good to ask on the Pi Forums maybe.

Otherwise... the service uses wayvnc for the Pi server part, and you could replicate the setup with TigerVNC easily enough over local LAN or through a VPN. The Pi Connect service is the hosted backend; not sure what they're using there.

[1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=370380

Apparently not.

.deb file: http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/pool/main/r/rpi-connec...

It contains two Go executables in its /usr/bin path: rpi-connect and rpi-connectd.

How is beer free? I never understood that

It makes more sense to state it as "Free as in free beer", as opposed to "Free as in free speech":

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/620/what-is-t...

Free as in “free beer”. You don’t own the rights to the beer, you don’t have the ingredient list, but it costs no money

> You don’t own the rights to the beer, you don’t have the ingredient list

But beer's recipe is open source, anyone can brew their own. It's a really bad analogy, it should be free Coca-Cola or something.

The idea of "free beer" is if I'm giving away free beer at my establishment during an event, there are restrictions around that free beer. I'm not gonna fill up a tanker truck for you, I'm gonna kick you out if you start trying to resell it, I'm gonna cut you off it you've had too much, you can't get any if you're under age, etc, etc, etc.

It's free, but you can't do anything you want with it. Really it's free to drink on my terms - and that's certainly "free", but it's not "freedom" (as in free speech).

The recipe for soda is also open source - anybody can make their own carbonated soft drink. But I think if someone offered you "free soda" it would be pretty clear that they are offering you a specific soda whose recipe you almost certainly don't know, not the umbrella concept of "soda".

Coca-cola is a type of soda so... I think you're agreeing with me? Kind of hard to tell.

"Free soda" and "free beer" are analogous, if that helps.

Or, since it seems to need explaining, the point is that "beer" is not one thing with one recipe and if somebody offers you "free beer" it is pretty obviously a specific kind and batch of beer.

You hang out with me? You get free beer.

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