"free" as in software (dragon.style repost)

[packbat]

We found ourselves ranting a bit about software terminology on dragon.style this morning, and it's the kind of thing that probably should be a blog post, so here is a blog post. Went ahead and added some links to it while I was transferring it over.

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It's a communication problem, fundamentally.

A typical computer-savvy person in 2020 would understand "free" in the context of software to mean "available as a running program without any payment from the user". That can be a bad thing - it can mean "free if you install this installer and make an account so we can send you promotional email forever", it can mean "free but we will deluge you with advertising and if that includes malware, that's your problem", it can mean "free but if you want to get anything out of using it, expect to pay for the privilege", whatever - but fundamentally "free" is about purchase price.

There are often ways, authorized and not, to get free copies (again, that's "free" as in "purchase price of zero") of programs that cost money. TIC-80 has an interesting setup: upgrading from the free version to the pro version normally means paying five bucks, but, as it says on the site: "For users who can't spend the money, we made it easy to build the pro version from the source code." A more typically commercial approach might be to bundle a normally-paid piece of software with some other purchase - buy this MIDI keyboard, get some free instruments that you can use in your DAW with it. And, of course, if you know how to find a third-party site that won't add malware to their downloads, there's sometimes third-party downloads.

So, yeah, "free" has a pretty clear meaning. It makes sense as a tech-savvy person to draw a distinction between "free, but..." and "free, period", and it makes sense as a tech-savvy person to avoid "free" software that comes with unpleasant features like anti-piracy rootkits, but it's pretty clear what "free" means if you spend any amount of time around people who use computers.

"Free if you build it yourself" is not free. The TIC-80 devs know that and openly acknowledge it. I'm really glad they make that option available - if we liked TIC-80, we might learn how to build our own software and take advantage of it - but it's a distinction and they're open about it.

Ardour isn't open about it. And you can tell they're not open about it because people working with software like Ardour (e.g. YouTuber Andrew Huang) often think it's actually free and include it in lists of actually-free software, and because on their website they have an explicit "no, pay up" note in their FAQ. They call their software free, are frequently asked if it is free, and have already prepared a condescending statement towards anyone who wants to know why it isn't.

Is Ardour worth US$45? In a vacuum, it might be - we've never tried it and we don't intend to. But it's not marketed as a US$45 piece of software that has a subscription option and a build-it-yourself option, one that comes free with some OSes - it's marketed as Free Software.

It doesn't matter that they have an ideological argument for saying what they say (cw: alcohol in link). They're misleading people. It's a communication problem.