The adjective ''free'' in English is commonly used in one of two meanings: "at no monetary cost" (''gratis'') or "with little or no restriction" (''libre''). This ambiguity can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of

information Information is an Abstraction, abstract concept that refers to something which has the power Communication, to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the Interpretation (philosophy), interpretation (perhaps Interpretation (log ...

, such as

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal 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, ...

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 sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

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, co ...

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

s, according to the

license A license (American English) or licence (Commonwealth English) 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 part ...

s and legal restrictions that cover them, especially 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, otherwise known as open content. They encourage creators to create such content by using p ...

. For example, they are used to distinguish " freeware" (

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

''gratis'') from

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

(software ''libre''). Free software advocate and GNU founder

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 ...

advocates usage of the slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer." This basically means: "Think free as in ''libre'', not ''gratis''."

''Gratis''

''Gratis'' () in English is adopted from the various Romance and

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages, 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 spoke ...

, ultimately descending from the plural ablative 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 an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and det ...

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

. 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 ; its origin is closely related to ''

liberty Liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views. The concept of liberty can vary depending on perspective and context. In the Constitutional ...

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

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...

'' (OED) considers ''libre'' to be obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use. Unlike ', ' 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 freeware. With freeware, software is licensed only for personal use and the developer does not gain any monetary payment. With the advent of the

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 and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

(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 (social and political), power, and the analysis of political activities, political philosophy, political thought, polit ...

between

positive liberty Positive liberty, or positive freedom, 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 freed ...

and

negative liberty Negative liberty, or negative freedom, 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 ...

. 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.

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 an American 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 fo ...

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 Scientific literature, research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a convening in Budape ...

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 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 CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bu ...

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 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 nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

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. # 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. # 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 or quote 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 intro ...

, 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 may refer to: Music * "Searchin', Searchin", a 1957 song originally performed by The Coasters * Searching (China Black song), "Searching" (China Black song), a 1991 song by China Black * Searchin' (CeCe Peniston song), "Searchin" (C ...

as well as data-mining, but not for re-use 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.

Footnotes

References

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