Free Software Isn't Free

Note: This article was originally written on December, 12, 2020.

The title for this post sounds like a contradiction. How can something be free yet not free? That's because English is a little bit weird. Other languages (like Italian) don't have a word for free. Most romance languages have a word called (or derived from) "gratis", which refers to no price, and a word called (or dervived from) "libre", which means no restrictions. You've probably noticed that many free software have "libre" in their name. That's because the "free" in free software is about the freedom given to the user, not that the software is gratis. When I say "Free software isn't free", I mean that libre software isn't gratis and gratis software isn't free.

Of course, there are times when software is both libre and gratis. I'm not entirely sure I've ever seen libre software that wasn't also gratis, although I've seen many, many software that is gratis but not libre. I feel like this ambiguity has actually been one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of free software. I constantly see criticism of free software from people saying that you're the product when you use free software, people saying that free software advocates are just cheap, and even people saying that free software is communist. At the same time, programmers feel like it's not worth their time to program free software, because they think it's gratis and programmers obviously have to get paid if they want it to be a full-time job. Don't get me wrong, I love that I don't really have to pay for any of my software, but being gratis is just a secondary benefit of free software. If the Linux Foundation were to turn around tomorrow and say that they were going to charge people a fee to use any future version of the kernel (and they absolutely could under the GPL), I would probably pay for it. That's because what I ultimately want is software that respects my freedoms as a consumer.

According the the Free Software Foundation, free software has to obey four freedoms: the user must be able to use it however they want, the user must be allowed to study the source code, the user must be allowed to redistribute the software, and the user must be able to modify the software. You don't even need to make the code open-source, since the GPL itself even says that it's okay to make the code available to customers on request only, so long as you don't charge more than the cost to send it to them. These aren't radical new freedoms, if you really think about it. Let's say you buy a record player (if they even still make those). Obviously, the company can't sell it to you if it doesn't work, and the customer can always use it in unconventional ways like using it as a really large paperweight or for benchpressing without restriction by the company, so it follows freedom 0. If the customer wants, they can always take the record player apart and see how it works inside, so we also have freedom 1. You can always give it away or sell it if you don't want it anymore without restriction, so the user also has freedom 2. Finally, the user can make a new piece for the record player in his very convienent blacksmithing forge and use it to modify the record player, so the user has freedom 4. The idea that a customer wouldn't be able to have all four of these freedoms is a pretty new idea, and one that I don't like.

Of course, software is different from a record player, since a record player requires a lot more effort to duplicate than software. However, people have had a long history of distributing intellectual property. Every library you go to is based on the belief that books can and should be available to everybody free of charge. In fact, libraries even profit off of books by charging fees if you don't return them in time. Now that we have ebooks, libraries even give away the books for the "borrower" to keep, free of charge. In many ways, librarians were the free software advocates before software was invented. Of course, people have been able to get software for free (gratis) for a long time now, thanks to torrenting. Still, the companies who made the software (or the song, game, movie, etc etc) still do just fine, because a significant amount of people still choose to buy the software out of ethical reasons. Removing restrictions on redistributing software shouldn't change this all that much. If somebody takes your software and improves it by such a significant amount that people buy their version instead of yours, then it's your fault for releasing an inferior product and you should release a new patch so your software is even better than the fork. That's just how the free market works, baby. Either way, the consumers come out on top from this, since the increased competion means that companies have no choice but to make their software even better instead of staying mediocre.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with non-libre software is that you're the product. Just look at Windows. Even though you pay for it (probably not directly, but it's bundled into the cost of your computer), it still gives you ads and comes pre-installed with awful games that paid off Microsoft. Not only that, they collect your data through telemetry to use for market research and then sell it to all sorts of companies who also want to use your data to study. You are paying to be a walking commodity for massive corporations who risk YOUR data being stolen or falling into the wrong hands so THEY can turn a profit. You can't do that with free software. If somebody tries to create software that shoves unskippable ads down your throat or steals your data, then somebody will modify the software to disable these features and distribute their version themselves. Maybe you disagree with me, and that's okay. All I know is is that my experience with computers have gotten much better since I've started to use free software.