informIT: The Cost of Free Software

“To the Free Software Foundation, the cost of software is
irrelevant. When they selected the term free software, freedom, not
money, was primarily on their minds. The fact that English uses the
same word to represent both liberty and lack of cost was one of the
reasons for the creation of the open source movement. To avoid
confusion, we’ll adopt the Free Software Foundation’s convention of
using gratis and libre to refer to cost and freedom,
respectively.

“To an outsider, the free software movement and the open source
movement may resemble the ‘Judean Peoples’ Front’ and the ‘Peoples’
Front of Judea…'”

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