According to CESC Ltd chief information officer Subroto Das, “There is nothing called free software”. I beg to differ.

In an article titled, Free software wars re-ignite (warning: many pop-ups), Indranil Chakraborty writes about the continuing war between the Free/Open Source Software movement and the non-free software camp. It really has not re-ignited; it continues. The Free Software movement has not stopped fighting for two seconds. The war may enter new domains and encompass and ever-growing number of organizations and people. But it has not stopped, not even for a breather. Even so, the focus of this article is not whether the wars have re-ignited, but the value of Free Software.

Chakraborty quotes IBM, Sun and Microsoft executives, showing the differing viewpoints. Two of the quotes focus on the notion that Free Software is most valuable, either to a subset of users, or at a certain level - the OS, for example, but that the end-result should use a restrictive license of some sort. The article also quotes one of those TCO studies showing Windows to have a lower TCO than GNU/Linux systems over a period of 5 years. Against the backdrop of comments about Free Software being the ideal in certain situations, along with the TCO study, Subroto Das is quoted as saying, "There is nothing called free software".

Das continues, "In most cases, open source software charges its customer. Red Hat and Novel [sic] are example [sic] where these vendors are charging their customers for support and services." And herein lies one of the major problems that most people - especially executives - have with Free Software. Das has twisted the meaning of 'free'. While I don't know Das well enough to determine whether or not his twisting of the meaning is intentional, it definitely does all of us a disservice.

From the very beginning, the Free Software Foundation has maintained that the word "free" in Free Software does not refer to "free" as in "free beer". In other words, the emphasis is on the freedom, the liberty one gets when using Free Software. It might have been better named "Libertyware", but alas, the founder of the Free Software Foundation chose to stick with the word "free". At no time has the Free Software Movement ever posed the point that Free Software is without cost, although some have wrongly suggested it should be.

Indeed, the Free Software Foundation suggests distributors may as well charge a fee for passing along a copy. This is, after all, a capitalist economy. Ironically, some in the community seem to believe Free Software should, in fact, be gratis as well as libre. This only adds to the confusion, especially for management types. Additionally, when someone does charge a fee for distribution, they are sometimes lambasted for doing so. The biggest problem is that many people never really take the time to read the GPL FAQ, or other information available from the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project.

The truth is, I think the idea was not to give away the whole bag of chips for free, but to simply avoid per copy royalties and non-disclosure agreements. The FSF has always encouraged people to charge a fee. I really think the idea was to allow people to charge those who could afford to pay, and to help those who could not by passing along a free copy. Non-Free software, more often than not, either prevents us from controlling our hardware the way we, as users, want to control it, or it limits our ability to help others. Frequently, it impacts us both ways.

Frankly, I see attempts to twist the meaning of the word free in Free Software as cheap shots, meant to destroy the true meaning of the term. Forcing the expectation of gratis does a grave injustice, not only to the decision makers in the corporate workplace, it also makes it more difficult for FOSS businesses to really thrive, since people then assume there is no cost. Worse still, it distracts us from the real meaning - the real purpose of Free Software. It distracts us from the fact that Free Software frees and empowers the user to use, study, modify and redistribute the software.

Maybe it's the fact that so many people tout the gratis expectation over the libre nature of Free Software. After all, there is a large component of the FOSS community that says, "Shhh... don't say anything about the freedom thing..." Maybe it's all the studies certain vendors pay for to show how their software costs less to use than GNU/Linux. Or maybe it's just that reading comments like the one Das made really grinds my garlic. But for the umpteenth time, people...

It's all about the F-R-E-E-D-O-M!