The

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

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 A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

and

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

s. The terms ''gratis'' and ''libre'' may be used to categorise

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

, particularly

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program ...

s, according to the licenses and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities, as well as the broader free culture movement. For example, they are used to distinguish

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

(

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

''gratis'') from

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

(software ''libre'').

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in

free speech Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recog ...

, not free beer."

''Gratis''

''Gratis'' in English is adopted from the various

Romance Romance (from Vulgar Latin , "in the Roman language", i.e., "Latin") may refer to: Common meanings * Romance (love), emotional attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express the feelings * Romance languages, ...

and

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, E ...

, ultimately descending from the plural

ablative In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; sometimes abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. ...

and dative form of the first-

declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ...

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

''grātia'' in

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

. 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 Liberty is the ability to do as one pleases, or a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant (i.e. privilege). It is a synonym for the word freedom. In modern politics, liberty is understood as the state of being free within society fr ...

''. It denotes "the state of being free", as in "liberty" or "having freedom". The ''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a co ...

'' (OED) considers ''libre'' to be obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use. Unlike ''

gratis Gratis may refer to: * Free, meaning without charge. See Gratis versus libre * Gratis, Ohio, a village in Preble County, US * Gratis Township, Preble County, Ohio, US See also * Free (disambiguation) {{disambiguation ...

'', ''

libre Libre may refer to: Computing * Libre software, free software * Libre Computer Project, developer of open-hardware single-board computers Medicine * FreeStyle Libre, a glucose monitoring device Media * Libre Times, news site which people can fr ...

'' 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 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

. With freeware, software is licensed freely for regular use: the developer does not gain any monetary compensation. With the advent of the

movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly called open source or free and open-source software (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 Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and la ...

between

positive liberty Positive liberty is the possession of the power and resources to act in the context of the structural limitations of the broader society which impacts a person's ability to act, as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restra ...

and

negative liberty Negative liberty is freedom from interference by other people. Negative liberty is primarily concerned with freedom from external restraint and contrasts with positive liberty (the possession of the power and resources to fulfill one's own pote ...

. 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 Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of the 1949 dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', by George Orwell. In the novel, the Party created Newspeak to meet the ideological requirements ...

, a

constructed language A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction ...

featured in the book ''

Nineteen Eighty-Four ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (also stylised as ''1984'') is a dystopian social science fiction novel and cautionary tale written by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and fina ...

''. 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 Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to ac ...

, 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 Peter Dain Suber (born November 8, 1951) is a philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarl ...

and Stevan Harnad, two of the co-drafters of the original

Budapest Open Access Initiative The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a conference convened in Budapest by the Open ...

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 and the

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is an international statement on open access and access to knowledge. It emerged from a conference on open access hosted in the Harnack House in Berlin by the Max ...

. The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specific

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

s; 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 Reuse is the action or practice of using an item, whether for its original purpose (conventional reuse) or to fulfill a different function ( creative reuse or repurposing). It should be distinguished from recycling, which is the breaking down of u ...

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 movement, however, is not software but published, peer-reviewed 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 A quotation is the repetition of a sentence, phrase, or passage from speech or text that someone has said or written. In oral speech, it is the representation of an utterance (i.e. of something that a speaker actually said) that is introduced by ...

, 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 Harvesting is the process of gathering a ripe crop from the fields. Reaping is the cutting of grain or pulse for harvest, typically using a scythe, sickle, or reaper. On smaller farms with minimal mechanization, harvesting is the most labor- ...

and indexing for search as well as data-mining, but not for

in altered form (without the permission of the author). The formal analogy 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