free as in beer
expressionprogrammingops culture
The disambiguation of 'free software': gratis (free beer) versus libre (free speech) - price versus liberty.
English overloads one word where other languages have two, so the movement coined the beer test. The distinction has teeth: freeware costs nothing and grants nothing, while open source may cost money and still grant everything that matters - the source, the rights, the exit.
Free as in beer versus free as in speech distinguishes zero price from liberty, and English needs the gloss because it uses one word for both. Free beer costs nothing and grants you nothing; free speech may cost something and grants you the right to use, study, modify and redistribute.
The distinction is the foundation of the free software argument and it is why the movement kept insisting on the word despite the ambiguity. Software can be gratis and entirely closed: a proprietary application given away at no charge is free as in beer, and its users have no more control over it than if they had paid. The open source rebranding was partly an attempt to escape the confusion and partly a deliberate shift of emphasis from liberty to development methodology, which is why some people still object to it.
The modern relevance is that the confusion has commercial consequences. A free tier is beer. A permissive licence is speech. A service that is free to use and cannot be self-hosted, inspected or migrated away from is the beer case wearing the vocabulary of the speech case, and knowing which one you have is the difference between a discount and a dependency.
Also known as: free as in speech, gratis vs libre