The English adjective ''free'' is commonly used in one of two meanings: "at no monetary cost" (''gratis'') and "with little or no restriction" (''libre''). This ambiguity of ''free'' can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright and patents. The terms ''gratis'' and ''libre'' may be used to categorise intellectual property, particularly computer programs, according to the

license A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

s and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities, as well as the broader

free culture movement The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, ...

. For example, they are used to distinguish freeware ( software ''gratis'') from free software (software ''libre''). Richard Stallman summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."

''Gratis''

''Gratis'' in English is adopted from the various Romance and Germanic languages, ultimately descending from the plural ablative and

dative In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a ...

form of the first- declension noun ''grātia'' in Latin. It means "free" in the sense that some goods or service is supplied without need for payment, even though it may have value.

''Libre''

''Libre'' in English is adopted from the various Romance languages, ultimately descending from the Latin word ''līber''; its origin is closely related to '' liberty''. It denotes "the state of being free", as in "liberty" or "having freedom". The '' Oxford English Dictionary'' (OED) considers ''libre'' to be obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use. Unlike '' gratis'', '' libre'' appears in few English dictionaries, although there is no other English single-word adjective signifying "liberty" exclusively, without also meaning "at no monetary cost".

"Free beer" and "freedom of speech" distinction

In software development, where the

marginal cost In economics, the marginal cost is the change in the total cost that arises when the quantity produced is incremented, the cost of producing additional quantity. In some contexts, it refers to an increment of one unit of output, and in others it r ...

of an additional unit is zero, it is common for developers to make software available at no cost. One of the early and basic forms of this model is called freeware. With freeware, software is licensed freely for regular use: the developer does not gain any monetary compensation. With the advent of the free software movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly called

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

(called FLOSS, FOSS, or F/OSS). As the English adjective ''free'' does not distinguish between "for free" and "liberty", the phrases "free as in freedom of speech" (''libre'', free software) and "free as in free beer" (''gratis'', freeware) were adopted. Many in the free software movement feel strongly about the ''freedom'' to use the software, make modifications, etc., whether or not this freely usable software is to be exchanged for money. Therefore, this distinction became important. These phrases have become common, along with ''gratis'' and ''libre'', in the software development and computer law fields for encapsulating this distinction. The distinction is similar to the distinction made in political science between positive liberty and negative liberty. Like "free beer", positive liberty promises equal access by all without cost or regard to income, of a given good (assuming the good exists). Like "free speech", negative liberty safeguards the right to use of something (in this case, speech) without regard to whether in a given case there is a cost involved for this use. A comparison may be drawn between the ''gratis/libre'' distinction and Newspeak, a constructed language featured in the book '' Nineteen Eighty-Four''. Although the word ''free'' exists in Newspeak, it can only be used to communicate the absence of something, e.g. "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free of weeds". The word cannot denote free will, because Newspeak is engineered to eliminate its possibility in the minds of its speakers. Thus, Newspeak may be construed as eliminating the ''libre'' sense of the word "free," while keeping its ''gratis'' sense.

Uses in open-access academic publishing

In order to reflect real-world differences in the degree of open access, the distinction between gratis open access and libre open access was added in 2006 by Peter Suber and

Stevan Harnad Stevan Robert Harnad (Hernád István Róbert, Hesslein István, born June 2, 1945, Budapest) is a Hungarian-born cognitive scientist based in Montreal, Canada. Education Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McG ...

, two of the co-drafters of the original Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access publishing.Suber, Peter. 200
"Gratis and Libre Open Access"
Retrieved on 2011-12-03. Gratis open access refers to online access free of charge (which Wikipedia indicates with the icon ), and libre open access refers to online access free of charge plus some additional re-use rights (Wikipedia icon ). Libre open access is equivalent to the definition of open access in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing is a 2003 statement which defines the concept of open access and then supports that concept. The statement On 11 April 2003, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute held a meeting for 24 people to discus ...

and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specific Creative Commons licenses; these almost all require attribution of authorship to the original authors.

Comparison with use in software

The original gratis/libre distinction concerns software (i.e., code), with which users can potentially do two kinds of things: 1. access and use it; and 2. modify and re-use it. "Gratis" pertains to being to access and use the code, without a price-barrier, while "libre" pertains to being to modify and re-use the code, without a permission barrier. The target content of the

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

movement, however, is not software but published,

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

research journal article texts. 1. Source code accessibility and use. For published research articles, the case for making their text accessible free for all online (Gratis) is even stronger than it is for software code, because in the case of software, some developers may wish to give their code away for free, while others may wish to sell it, whereas in the case of published research article texts, ''all'' their authors, without exception, give them away for free: None seek or get royalties or fees from their sale. On the contrary, any access-denial to potential users means loss of potential research impact ( downloads, citations) for the author's research—and researcher-authors' employment, salary, promotion and funding depends in part on the uptake and impact of their research. 2. Source code modifiability and re-use. For published research articles, the case for allowing text modification and re-use is much weaker than for software code, because, unlike software, the ''text'' of a research article is not intended for modification and re-use. (In contrast, the ''content'' of research articles is and always was intended for modification and re-use: that is how research progresses.) There are no copyright barriers to modifying, developing, building upon and re-using an author's ideas and findings, once they have been published, as long as the author and published source are credited—but modifications to the published text are another matter. Apart from verbatim quotation, scholarly/scientific authors are not in general interested in allowing other authors to create " mashups" of their texts. Researcher-authors are all happy to make their texts available for harvesting and indexing for

search Searching or search may refer to: Computing technology * Search algorithm, including keyword search ** :Search algorithms * Search and optimization for problem solving in artificial intelligence * Search engine technology, software for findi ...

as well as data-mining, but not for re-use in altered form (without the permission of the author). The formal

analogy Analogy (from Greek ''analogia'', "proportion", from ''ana-'' "upon, according to" lso "against", "anew"+ ''logos'' "ratio" lso "word, speech, reckoning" is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject ( ...

between open software and open access has been made, Suber, Peter (2008
Gratis and libre open access
''SPARC Open Access Newsletter'', August 2, 2008 along with the generalization of the gratis/libre distinction from the one field to the other.

Explanatory notes

Citations

General sources

* ''Free as in Speech and Beer'', book by Darren Wershler-Henry
Stallman's discussion of FreeAsInBeer

External links

* * * * {{FOSS English phrases Free software culture and documents Free software