Dave Fawthrop wrote:
Just to point out that "free as in beer," must be a purely American expression which means nothing to the English, and I am unable to work out exactly why beer should be free.
Not at all. It is an expression common amongst the "open source" community world-wide. "Free as in beer" is just a flippant expression to disambiguate free of charge from free of legal encumbrance. The matched pair are: Free as in speach -- No technical, legal or ethical encumbrance. Free as in beer -- No charge. Nearly all of PG is free as in speach. "Free as in beer" also has the extra connotation of a free thing that really isn't or should not be free -- maybe like that first "free" shot of drugs. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre http://freeasinspeechandbeer.com/drupal/ ============================================================ Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@rogers.com> Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.