Gratis versus Libre
Encyclopedia
Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective
"free"; namely, "for zero price" (gratis) and "with little or no restriction" (libre). The ambiguity of "free" can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright
and patents.
The terms are largely used to categorise intellectual property
, particularly computer program
s, according to the license
s and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities
, as well as the broader free culture movement
. For example, they are used to distinguish freeware
(software gratis) from free software
(software libre).
Richard Stallman
summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."
adopted from the various Romance
and Germanic language
s, ultimately descending from the plural ablative and dative form of the first-declension
noun
grātia in Latin
. It means "free of charge", "at zero price", "free", in the sense that some good or service is supplied without payment, even though it may have value.
, ultimately descending from the Latin word lībere; its origin is closely related to liberty. It denotes "the state of being free", as in "liberty" or "having freedom". The Oxford English Dictionary
(OED) considers libre to be obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use. Unlike gratis, libre appears in few English dictionaries, although there is no other English single-word adjective signifying "liberty" exclusively, without also meaning "at no monetary cost".
. With freeware, software is licensed free of charge for regular use: the developer does not gain any monetary compensation.
With the advent of the free software
movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly called open source or free and open source software
(called FLOSS, FOSS, or F/OSS). As the English adjective free does not distinguish between "for zero price" and "liberty", the phrases "free as in free beer" (gratis, freeware) and "free as in free speech" (libre, free software) 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
between negative liberty
and positive liberty
. 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 each case there is a cost involved for this use (you still have free speech even though it costs money to open a newspaper).
it. "Gratis" pertains to being able to access and use the code, without a price-barrier, and "Libre" pertains to being allowed to modify and re-use the code, without a permission barrier. The target content of the Open Access movement, however, is not software but published, peer-reviewed
research journal article texts.
1. Code (text) 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. So whereas not all programmers may want their software to be accessible Gratis, all researchers want their articles to be accessible Gratis.
2. Code (text) 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
, scholarly/scientific authors are not in general interested in allowing other authors to create "Mashup
s" of their texts. Researcher-authors are all happy to make their texts available for harvesting
and indexing
for search
as well as data-mining
, but not for re-use
in altered form (without the permission of the author).
The formal analogy
, and the generalization of the Gratis/Libre distinction from Open Software to Open access (publishing), have been made. However, because of the substantive disanalogies regarding (1) and (2) noted above, the analogy needs to be treated with some caution.
Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective
"free"; namely, "for zero price" (gratis) and "with little or no restriction" (libre). The ambiguity of "free" can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright
and patents.
The terms are largely used to categorise intellectual property
, particularly computer program
s, according to the license
s and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities
, as well as the broader free culture movement
. For example, they are used to distinguish freeware
(software gratis) from free software
(software libre).
Richard Stallman
summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."
adopted from the various Romance
and Germanic language
s, ultimately descending from the plural ablative and dative form of the first-declension
noun
grātia in Latin
. It means "free of charge", "at zero price", "free", in the sense that some good or service is supplied without payment, even though it may have value.
, ultimately descending from the Latin word lībere; its origin is closely related to liberty. It denotes "the state of being free", as in "liberty" or "having freedom". The Oxford English Dictionary
(OED) considers libre to be obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use. Unlike gratis, libre appears in few English dictionaries, although there is no other English single-word adjective signifying "liberty" exclusively, without also meaning "at no monetary cost".
. With freeware, software is licensed free of charge for regular use: the developer does not gain any monetary compensation.
With the advent of the free software
movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly called open source or free and open source software
(called FLOSS, FOSS, or F/OSS). As the English adjective free does not distinguish between "for zero price" and "liberty", the phrases "free as in free beer" (gratis, freeware) and "free as in free speech" (libre, free software) 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
between negative liberty
and positive liberty
. 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 each case there is a cost involved for this use (you still have free speech even though it costs money to open a newspaper).
it. "Gratis" pertains to being able to access and use the code, without a price-barrier, and "Libre" pertains to being allowed to modify and re-use the code, without a permission barrier. The target content of the Open Access movement, however, is not software but published, peer-reviewed
research journal article texts.
1. Code (text) 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. So whereas not all programmers may want their software to be accessible Gratis, all researchers want their articles to be accessible Gratis.
2. Code (text) 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
, scholarly/scientific authors are not in general interested in allowing other authors to create "Mashup
s" of their texts. Researcher-authors are all happy to make their texts available for harvesting
and indexing
for search
as well as data-mining
, but not for re-use
in altered form (without the permission of the author).
The formal analogy
, and the generalization of the Gratis/Libre distinction from Open Software to Open access (publishing), have been made. However, because of the substantive disanalogies regarding (1) and (2) noted above, the analogy needs to be treated with some caution.
Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective
"free"; namely, "for zero price" (gratis) and "with little or no restriction" (libre). The ambiguity of "free" can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright
and patents.
The terms are largely used to categorise intellectual property
, particularly computer program
s, according to the license
s and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities
, as well as the broader free culture movement
. For example, they are used to distinguish freeware
(software gratis) from free software
(software libre).
Richard Stallman
summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."
adopted from the various Romance
and Germanic language
s, ultimately descending from the plural ablative and dative form of the first-declension
noun
grātia in Latin
. It means "free of charge", "at zero price", "free", in the sense that some good or service is supplied without payment, even though it may have value.
, ultimately descending from the Latin word lībere; its origin is closely related to liberty. It denotes "the state of being free", as in "liberty" or "having freedom". The Oxford English Dictionary
(OED) considers libre to be obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use. Unlike gratis, libre appears in few English dictionaries, although there is no other English single-word adjective signifying "liberty" exclusively, without also meaning "at no monetary cost".
. With freeware, software is licensed free of charge for regular use: the developer does not gain any monetary compensation.
With the advent of the free software
movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly called open source or free and open source software
(called FLOSS, FOSS, or F/OSS). As the English adjective free does not distinguish between "for zero price" and "liberty", the phrases "free as in free beer" (gratis, freeware) and "free as in free speech" (libre, free software) 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
between negative liberty
and positive liberty
. 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 each case there is a cost involved for this use (you still have free speech even though it costs money to open a newspaper).
it. "Gratis" pertains to being able to access and use the code, without a price-barrier, and "Libre" pertains to being allowed to modify and re-use the code, without a permission barrier. The target content of the Open Access movement, however, is not software but published, peer-reviewed
research journal article texts.
1. Code (text) 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. So whereas not all programmers may want their software to be accessible Gratis, all researchers want their articles to be accessible Gratis.
2. Code (text) 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
, scholarly/scientific authors are not in general interested in allowing other authors to create "Mashup
s" of their texts. Researcher-authors are all happy to make their texts available for harvesting
and indexing
for search
as well as data-mining
, but not for re-use
in altered form (without the permission of the author).
The formal analogy
, and the generalization of the Gratis/Libre distinction from Open Software to Open access (publishing), have been made. However, because of the substantive disanalogies regarding (1) and (2) noted above, the analogy needs to be treated with some caution.
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
"free"; namely, "for zero price" (gratis) and "with little or no restriction" (libre). The ambiguity of "free" can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
and patents.
The terms are largely used to categorise intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
, particularly computer program
Computer program
A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...
s, according to the license
License
The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun license or licence refers to that permission as well as to the document recording that permission.A license may be granted by a party to another party as an element of an agreement...
s and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities
Free software community
The free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement. The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof...
, as well as the broader free culture movement
Free Culture movement
The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content by using the Internet and other forms of media....
. For example, they are used to distinguish freeware
Freeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
(software gratis) from free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
(software libre).
Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."
Gratis
Gratis in English is a colloquialismColloquialism
A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...
adopted from the various Romance
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
and Germanic language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s, ultimately descending from the plural ablative and dative form of the first-declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
grātia in Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
. It means "free of charge", "at zero price", "free", in the sense that some good or service is supplied without payment, even though it may have value.
Libre
Libre (icon) in English is adopted from the various Romance languagesRomance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, ultimately descending from the Latin word lībere; its origin is closely related to liberty. It denotes "the state of being free", as in "liberty" or "having freedom". The Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
(OED) considers libre to be obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use. Unlike gratis, libre 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" vs "free speech" distinction
In software development, where the cost of mass production is relatively small, it is common for developers to make software available at no cost. One of the early and basic forms of this model is called freewareFreeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
. With freeware, software is licensed free of charge for regular use: the developer does not gain any monetary compensation.
With the advent of the free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly called open source or free and open source software
Free and open source software
Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...
(called FLOSS, FOSS, or F/OSS). As the English adjective free does not distinguish between "for zero price" and "liberty", the phrases "free as in free beer" (gratis, freeware) and "free as in free speech" (libre, free software) 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
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
between negative liberty
Negative liberty
Negative liberty is defined as freedom from interference by other people, and is set in contrast to positive liberty, which is defined as an individual's freedom from inhibitions of the social structure within the society such as classism, sexism or racism and is primarily concerned with the...
and positive liberty
Positive liberty
Positive liberty is defined as having the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential ; as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint...
. 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 each case there is a cost involved for this use (you still have free speech even though it costs money to open a newspaper).
Generalizing the "Gratis/Libre" distinction to the Open Access movement
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-useCode reuse
Code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software.-Overview:Ad hoc code reuse has been practiced from the earliest days of programming. Programmers have always reused sections of code, templates, functions, and procedures...
it. "Gratis" pertains to being able to access and use the code, without a price-barrier, and "Libre" pertains to being allowed to modify and re-use the code, without a permission barrier. The target content of the Open Access movement, however, is not software but published, peer-reviewed
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
research journal article texts.
1. Code (text) 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
Citation impact
Citation is the process of acknowledging or citing the author, year, title, and locus of publication of a source used in a published work. Such citations can be counted as measures of the usage and impact of the cited work. This is called citation analysis or bibliometrics...
) for the author's research—and researcher-authors' employment, salary, promotion and funding depends in part on the uptake and impact
Scientometrics
Scientometrics is the science of measuring and analysing science. In practice, scientometrics is often done using bibliometrics which is a measurement of the impact of publications. Modern scientometrics is mostly based on the work of Derek J. de Solla Price and Eugene Garfield...
of their research. So whereas not all programmers may want their software to be accessible Gratis, all researchers want their articles to be accessible Gratis.
2. Code (text) modifiability and re-use. For published research articles, the case for allowing text modification and re-use
Code reuse
Code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software.-Overview:Ad hoc code reuse has been practiced from the earliest days of programming. Programmers have always reused sections of code, templates, functions, and procedures...
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
Quotation
A quotation or quote is the repetition of one expression as part of another one, particularly when the quoted expression is well-known or explicitly attributed by citation to its original source, and it is indicated by quotation marks.A quotation can also refer to the repeated use of units of any...
, scholarly/scientific authors are not in general interested in allowing other authors to create "Mashup
Mashup (book)
A mashup novel, or mashup book , is a work of fiction which combines a pre-existing text, often a classic work of fiction, with a certain popular genre such as vampire or zombie narratives...
s" of their texts. Researcher-authors are all happy to make their texts available for harvesting
Web harvesting
Web harvesting is commonly used to describe Web scraping from a multitude of sites. It also refers to an implementation of a Web crawler that uses human expertise or machine guidance to direct the crawler to URLs which compose a specialized collection or set of knowledge...
and indexing
Index (search engine)
Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science...
for search
Search engine technology
Modern web search engines are complex software systems using the technology that has evolved over the years. There are several categories of search engine software: Web search engines , database or structured data search engines , and mixed search engines or enterprise search...
as well as data-mining
Data mining
Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
, but not for re-use
Code reuse
Code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software.-Overview:Ad hoc code reuse has been practiced from the earliest days of programming. Programmers have always reused sections of code, templates, functions, and procedures...
in altered form (without the permission of the author).
The formal analogy
Analogy
Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
, and the generalization of the Gratis/Libre distinction from Open Software to Open access (publishing), have been made. However, because of the substantive disanalogies regarding (1) and (2) noted above, the analogy needs to be treated with some caution.
See also
- Alternative terms for free softwareAlternative terms for free softwareAlternative terms for free software have been a controversial issue among free software users from the late 1990s onwards. Coined in 1983 by Richard Stallman, "free software" is used to describe software which can be used, modified, and redistributed with little or no restriction...
- Free software communityFree software communityThe free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement. The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof...
- Libre knowledgeLibre knowledgeLibre knowledge is knowledge which may be acquired, interpreted and applied freely. It can be re-formulated according to one's needs, and shared with others for community benefit....
- List of FSF approved software licences
- List of open source licensesOpen-source licenseAn open-source license is a copyright license for computer software that makes the source code available for everyone to use. This allows end users to review and modify the source code for their own customization and/or troubleshooting needs...
External links
- Gratis and libre open access. An article by Peter Suber (August 2008) borrowing the gratis/libre distinction from the domain of software and applying it to the domain of peer-reviewed research articles.
Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
"free"; namely, "for zero price" (gratis) and "with little or no restriction" (libre). The ambiguity of "free" can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
and patents.
The terms are largely used to categorise intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
, particularly computer program
Computer program
A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...
s, according to the license
License
The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun license or licence refers to that permission as well as to the document recording that permission.A license may be granted by a party to another party as an element of an agreement...
s and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities
Free software community
The free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement. The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof...
, as well as the broader free culture movement
Free Culture movement
The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content by using the Internet and other forms of media....
. For example, they are used to distinguish freeware
Freeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
(software gratis) from free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
(software libre).
Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."
Gratis
Gratis in English is a colloquialismColloquialism
A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...
adopted from the various Romance
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
and Germanic language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s, ultimately descending from the plural ablative and dative form of the first-declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
grātia in Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
. It means "free of charge", "at zero price", "free", in the sense that some good or service is supplied without payment, even though it may have value.
Libre
Libre (icon) in English is adopted from the various Romance languagesRomance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, ultimately descending from the Latin word lībere; its origin is closely related to liberty. It denotes "the state of being free", as in "liberty" or "having freedom". The Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
(OED) considers libre to be obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use. Unlike gratis, libre 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" vs "free speech" distinction
In software development, where the cost of mass production is relatively small, it is common for developers to make software available at no cost. One of the early and basic forms of this model is called freewareFreeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
. With freeware, software is licensed free of charge for regular use: the developer does not gain any monetary compensation.
With the advent of the free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly called open source or free and open source software
Free and open source software
Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...
(called FLOSS, FOSS, or F/OSS). As the English adjective free does not distinguish between "for zero price" and "liberty", the phrases "free as in free beer" (gratis, freeware) and "free as in free speech" (libre, free software) 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
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
between negative liberty
Negative liberty
Negative liberty is defined as freedom from interference by other people, and is set in contrast to positive liberty, which is defined as an individual's freedom from inhibitions of the social structure within the society such as classism, sexism or racism and is primarily concerned with the...
and positive liberty
Positive liberty
Positive liberty is defined as having the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential ; as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint...
. 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 each case there is a cost involved for this use (you still have free speech even though it costs money to open a newspaper).
Generalizing the "Gratis/Libre" distinction to the Open Access movement
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-useCode reuse
Code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software.-Overview:Ad hoc code reuse has been practiced from the earliest days of programming. Programmers have always reused sections of code, templates, functions, and procedures...
it. "Gratis" pertains to being able to access and use the code, without a price-barrier, and "Libre" pertains to being allowed to modify and re-use the code, without a permission barrier. The target content of the Open Access movement, however, is not software but published, peer-reviewed
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
research journal article texts.
1. Code (text) 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
Citation impact
Citation is the process of acknowledging or citing the author, year, title, and locus of publication of a source used in a published work. Such citations can be counted as measures of the usage and impact of the cited work. This is called citation analysis or bibliometrics...
) for the author's research—and researcher-authors' employment, salary, promotion and funding depends in part on the uptake and impact
Scientometrics
Scientometrics is the science of measuring and analysing science. In practice, scientometrics is often done using bibliometrics which is a measurement of the impact of publications. Modern scientometrics is mostly based on the work of Derek J. de Solla Price and Eugene Garfield...
of their research. So whereas not all programmers may want their software to be accessible Gratis, all researchers want their articles to be accessible Gratis.
2. Code (text) modifiability and re-use. For published research articles, the case for allowing text modification and re-use
Code reuse
Code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software.-Overview:Ad hoc code reuse has been practiced from the earliest days of programming. Programmers have always reused sections of code, templates, functions, and procedures...
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
Quotation
A quotation or quote is the repetition of one expression as part of another one, particularly when the quoted expression is well-known or explicitly attributed by citation to its original source, and it is indicated by quotation marks.A quotation can also refer to the repeated use of units of any...
, scholarly/scientific authors are not in general interested in allowing other authors to create "Mashup
Mashup (book)
A mashup novel, or mashup book , is a work of fiction which combines a pre-existing text, often a classic work of fiction, with a certain popular genre such as vampire or zombie narratives...
s" of their texts. Researcher-authors are all happy to make their texts available for harvesting
Web harvesting
Web harvesting is commonly used to describe Web scraping from a multitude of sites. It also refers to an implementation of a Web crawler that uses human expertise or machine guidance to direct the crawler to URLs which compose a specialized collection or set of knowledge...
and indexing
Index (search engine)
Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science...
for search
Search engine technology
Modern web search engines are complex software systems using the technology that has evolved over the years. There are several categories of search engine software: Web search engines , database or structured data search engines , and mixed search engines or enterprise search...
as well as data-mining
Data mining
Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
, but not for re-use
Code reuse
Code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software.-Overview:Ad hoc code reuse has been practiced from the earliest days of programming. Programmers have always reused sections of code, templates, functions, and procedures...
in altered form (without the permission of the author).
The formal analogy
Analogy
Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
, and the generalization of the Gratis/Libre distinction from Open Software to Open access (publishing), have been made. However, because of the substantive disanalogies regarding (1) and (2) noted above, the analogy needs to be treated with some caution.
See also
- Alternative terms for free softwareAlternative terms for free softwareAlternative terms for free software have been a controversial issue among free software users from the late 1990s onwards. Coined in 1983 by Richard Stallman, "free software" is used to describe software which can be used, modified, and redistributed with little or no restriction...
- Free software communityFree software communityThe free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement. The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof...
- Libre knowledgeLibre knowledgeLibre knowledge is knowledge which may be acquired, interpreted and applied freely. It can be re-formulated according to one's needs, and shared with others for community benefit....
- List of FSF approved software licences
- List of open source licensesOpen-source licenseAn open-source license is a copyright license for computer software that makes the source code available for everyone to use. This allows end users to review and modify the source code for their own customization and/or troubleshooting needs...
External links
- Gratis and libre open access. An article by Peter Suber (August 2008) borrowing the gratis/libre distinction from the domain of software and applying it to the domain of peer-reviewed research articles.
Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
"free"; namely, "for zero price" (gratis) and "with little or no restriction" (libre). The ambiguity of "free" can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
and patents.
The terms are largely used to categorise intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
, particularly computer program
Computer program
A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...
s, according to the license
License
The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun license or licence refers to that permission as well as to the document recording that permission.A license may be granted by a party to another party as an element of an agreement...
s and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities
Free software community
The free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement. The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof...
, as well as the broader free culture movement
Free Culture movement
The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content by using the Internet and other forms of media....
. For example, they are used to distinguish freeware
Freeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
(software gratis) from free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
(software libre).
Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
summarised the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."
Gratis
Gratis in English is a colloquialismColloquialism
A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...
adopted from the various Romance
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
and Germanic language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s, ultimately descending from the plural ablative and dative form of the first-declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
grātia in Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
. It means "free of charge", "at zero price", "free", in the sense that some good or service is supplied without payment, even though it may have value.
Libre
Libre (icon) in English is adopted from the various Romance languagesRomance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, ultimately descending from the Latin word lībere; its origin is closely related to liberty. It denotes "the state of being free", as in "liberty" or "having freedom". The Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
(OED) considers libre to be obsolete, but the word has come back into limited use. Unlike gratis, libre 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" vs "free speech" distinction
In software development, where the cost of mass production is relatively small, it is common for developers to make software available at no cost. One of the early and basic forms of this model is called freewareFreeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
. With freeware, software is licensed free of charge for regular use: the developer does not gain any monetary compensation.
With the advent of the free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly called open source or free and open source software
Free and open source software
Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...
(called FLOSS, FOSS, or F/OSS). As the English adjective free does not distinguish between "for zero price" and "liberty", the phrases "free as in free beer" (gratis, freeware) and "free as in free speech" (libre, free software) 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
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
between negative liberty
Negative liberty
Negative liberty is defined as freedom from interference by other people, and is set in contrast to positive liberty, which is defined as an individual's freedom from inhibitions of the social structure within the society such as classism, sexism or racism and is primarily concerned with the...
and positive liberty
Positive liberty
Positive liberty is defined as having the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential ; as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint...
. 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 each case there is a cost involved for this use (you still have free speech even though it costs money to open a newspaper).
Generalizing the "Gratis/Libre" distinction to the Open Access movement
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-useCode reuse
Code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software.-Overview:Ad hoc code reuse has been practiced from the earliest days of programming. Programmers have always reused sections of code, templates, functions, and procedures...
it. "Gratis" pertains to being able to access and use the code, without a price-barrier, and "Libre" pertains to being allowed to modify and re-use the code, without a permission barrier. The target content of the Open Access movement, however, is not software but published, peer-reviewed
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
research journal article texts.
1. Code (text) 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
Citation impact
Citation is the process of acknowledging or citing the author, year, title, and locus of publication of a source used in a published work. Such citations can be counted as measures of the usage and impact of the cited work. This is called citation analysis or bibliometrics...
) for the author's research—and researcher-authors' employment, salary, promotion and funding depends in part on the uptake and impact
Scientometrics
Scientometrics is the science of measuring and analysing science. In practice, scientometrics is often done using bibliometrics which is a measurement of the impact of publications. Modern scientometrics is mostly based on the work of Derek J. de Solla Price and Eugene Garfield...
of their research. So whereas not all programmers may want their software to be accessible Gratis, all researchers want their articles to be accessible Gratis.
2. Code (text) modifiability and re-use. For published research articles, the case for allowing text modification and re-use
Code reuse
Code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software.-Overview:Ad hoc code reuse has been practiced from the earliest days of programming. Programmers have always reused sections of code, templates, functions, and procedures...
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
Quotation
A quotation or quote is the repetition of one expression as part of another one, particularly when the quoted expression is well-known or explicitly attributed by citation to its original source, and it is indicated by quotation marks.A quotation can also refer to the repeated use of units of any...
, scholarly/scientific authors are not in general interested in allowing other authors to create "Mashup
Mashup (book)
A mashup novel, or mashup book , is a work of fiction which combines a pre-existing text, often a classic work of fiction, with a certain popular genre such as vampire or zombie narratives...
s" of their texts. Researcher-authors are all happy to make their texts available for harvesting
Web harvesting
Web harvesting is commonly used to describe Web scraping from a multitude of sites. It also refers to an implementation of a Web crawler that uses human expertise or machine guidance to direct the crawler to URLs which compose a specialized collection or set of knowledge...
and indexing
Index (search engine)
Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science...
for search
Search engine technology
Modern web search engines are complex software systems using the technology that has evolved over the years. There are several categories of search engine software: Web search engines , database or structured data search engines , and mixed search engines or enterprise search...
as well as data-mining
Data mining
Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
, but not for re-use
Code reuse
Code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software.-Overview:Ad hoc code reuse has been practiced from the earliest days of programming. Programmers have always reused sections of code, templates, functions, and procedures...
in altered form (without the permission of the author).
The formal analogy
Analogy
Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
, and the generalization of the Gratis/Libre distinction from Open Software to Open access (publishing), have been made. However, because of the substantive disanalogies regarding (1) and (2) noted above, the analogy needs to be treated with some caution.
See also
- Alternative terms for free softwareAlternative terms for free softwareAlternative terms for free software have been a controversial issue among free software users from the late 1990s onwards. Coined in 1983 by Richard Stallman, "free software" is used to describe software which can be used, modified, and redistributed with little or no restriction...
- Free software communityFree software communityThe free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement. The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof...
- Libre knowledgeLibre knowledgeLibre knowledge is knowledge which may be acquired, interpreted and applied freely. It can be re-formulated according to one's needs, and shared with others for community benefit....
- List of FSF approved software licences
- List of open source licensesOpen-source licenseAn open-source license is a copyright license for computer software that makes the source code available for everyone to use. This allows end users to review and modify the source code for their own customization and/or troubleshooting needs...
External links
- Gratis and libre open access. An article by Peter Suber (August 2008) borrowing the gratis/libre distinction from the domain of software and applying it to the domain of peer-reviewed research articles.