We often think of open source as “free software.” That’s a good association. Many people follow the tradition, dating from the ’80s, of referring to software that offers users the liberty to deploy, study, modify, and distribute its source code as “free software.”
But that’s “free” as in liberty, not “free” as in beer. Like it or not, the idea of getting something for nothing still drives many customers to open source solutions — and can deceive them into into thinking it’s wrong to pay people for open source software.