What "Free" Actually Means in Free Software

Section 01The word that trips everyone up

"Free software" sounds like a bargain. Most people hear it and picture something that costs nothing — a zero in the price field, a download without a credit card. That instinct is not entirely wrong. A great deal of free software does cost nothing to obtain. But the phrase was never coined to describe a price. It describes a set of permissions, and whether or not money changes hands is almost beside the point.

Richard Stallman, who launched the GNU Project in 1983 and went on to found the Free Software Foundation, put it plainly: free as in freedom, not free as in beer. The beer metaphor has become a cliché, but it earns its keep because it names the confusion so sharply. A free beer is gone once you drink it; you cannot study the recipe, adapt it, or brew your own batch. Free software, by contrast, is defined precisely by what you are allowed to do with it after you have it — and "have it" may or may not involve money.

The Free Software Foundation defines free software through four numbered freedoms. Freedom 0 is the right to run the program for any purpose. Freedom 1 is the right to study how it works and change it. Freedom 2 is the right to redistribute copies. Freedom 3 is the right to distribute copies of your modified version. Notice what is absent: any mention of price. The FSF's own position is that selling free software is perfectly acceptable. What makes software unfree, in this framework, is not a price tag but a restriction on those four activities.

Section 02Where the two meanings collide — and where they part

In practice, the two meanings of "free" overlap more than they diverge. Most software that carries the four freedoms is also available at no charge, simply because the economics of restricting a digital copy are awkward once the source code is public. If anyone can legally obtain your code and redistribute it, charging for the download becomes difficult to sustain. So "free to use" and "free as in freedom" often arrive together, and the conflation is understandable.

But the overlap is not the whole picture. Consider freeware: software distributed at no charge, often for Windows, often by small developers or companies who offer it as a stripped-down version of something larger. Freeware costs nothing, but you typically receive no source code, no right to modify it, and no right to share modified versions. It is free in the price sense alone. Under the FSF's definition it is proprietary software, full stop — the freedoms are absent regardless of what you paid.

Now go the other way: commercial free software. The Free Software Foundation itself notes that this is not a contradiction. A company may write software, publish the source code under a licence that grants all four freedoms, and charge for copies, for support contracts, or for binaries built to a particular specification. The software is free in the permission sense; money is involved; neither fact cancels the other. Red Hat has built an entire business model around distributing software under open licences and charging for enterprise support. The transaction does not make the software unfree.

Under the FSF's definition it is proprietary software, full stop — the freedoms are absent regardless of what you paid.

The Open Source Initiative — a separate organisation founded in 1998, with a definition that runs to ten criteria rather than four freedoms — reaches much the same practical conclusion by a different route. The OSI's Open Source Definition requires, among other things, that a licence not restrict the software from being sold as a component of a larger work, and that it not discriminate against fields of endeavour or groups of people. Here too, price is not the criterion. Gratis and libre both appear under the open-source umbrella, though not every open licence satisfies both organisations' tests equally well.

Section 03The licence is where it is settled

All of this comes down to one document: the licence. Whatever you believe "free" should mean, the licence is the text that decides what you may actually do. It is a legal instrument — this is not legal advice, but a statement of how these documents function — and it overrides intuition, marketing copy, and the absence of a price field on a download page.

A licence in the GPL family grants the four freedoms and adds a condition: if you distribute a modified version, you must distribute it under the same terms. The freedom propagates forward. The MIT licence and the BSD licences also grant all four freedoms but impose almost no conditions on redistribution — you may incorporate MIT-licensed code into a proprietary product, close the source, and sell the result. The Apache Software Foundation publishes its own licence, Apache 2.0, which similarly permits commercial and proprietary use while adding an explicit patent grant and some attribution requirements.

None of these licences sets a price. What they vary is the set of conditions attached to redistribution. The distinction between "permissive" licences like MIT and Apache 2.0 and "copyleft" licences like the GPL is not about money at all. It is about what happens downstream — whether the freedoms must be preserved when the software is passed along.

A programme that carries no licence, meanwhile, is not free in either sense. In most jurisdictions, software is automatically covered by copyright from the moment of creation. Without an explicit grant of permission, a user may have the right to run a program they have purchased but almost certainly not to modify or redistribute it. The absence of a price is irrelevant to that legal situation. Unlicensed code distributed gratis is, from a permissions standpoint, proprietary.

Section 04Why this distinction matters in everyday use

If you use software only for yourself and never modify or redistribute it, the distinction between "free as in price" and "free as in freedom" may seem academic. You run the program; it works; the cost was zero. But the distinction surfaces in ways that are not academic at all.

Privacy and auditability are one area. Software whose source code is publicly available and whose licence permits study can, in principle, be examined for what it actually does — what data it collects, what it sends and where. Proprietary freeware cannot be inspected in the same way, because the freedoms to study and modify are absent. This is why security researchers focus heavily on whether source code is available, not merely whether a download was free. The relationship between openness and trust is real, if complicated.

Longevity is another. Software that grants you Freedom 2 and Freedom 3 — redistribution and distribution of modifications — can survive the death or disinterest of its original creator. Volunteers can fork it, maintain it, and keep it running. Freeware that a company stops updating simply stops. The licence determines whether a community can legally step in.

There is also the matter of what you build. Developers who incorporate third-party code into their own projects must know what the licence permits. Mixing GPL code into a proprietary product generally is not allowed under that licence's terms. Mixing MIT-licensed code into one is, broadly, fine. Getting this wrong has consequences that range from the embarrassing to the legally serious.

Section 05A one-sentence rule

The language around free software has never fully resolved its own ambiguity. "Open source" was coined partly to sidestep the confusion by avoiding the word "free" altogether — a pragmatic rebranding that the Open Source Initiative drove from the late 1990s onward. The FSF has always preferred "free software" and considers "open source" to miss the political and ethical point. Both camps are describing substantially overlapping territory with different emphasis.

For anyone trying to make sense of a specific program, the practical rule is this: ignore the word "free" in the name or description, find the licence, and read what it permits. Price is a separate question, answered separately. The licence tells you what the software actually is.