Intellectual freedom in the Information age has a rich history of terminology and semantics, encompassing many subtleties of expression, and deriving from many important historical events. This document serves as a lexicon of the various turns of phrase used to describe the issues and rights surrounding the contemporary use of information works, along with some of my own colloquialisms.

Free Software Foundation, http://www.gnu.org/

The title of a book by Lawrence Lessig. A student movement has also sprung up to explore issues raised in the book.

Largely attributed to the influence of Eric Raymond, author of The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar, one of the seminal works describing the phenomenon of open source and free software.

"Open Source" is a term used to describe software covered under royalty-free licenses which include the rights to use, redistribute, modify, and redistribute modifications to the software. This includes most FSF licenses, as well as BSD-style licenses, the Apache and Mozilla licenses.

"Free (as in Libre) and Open Source Software"

"CopyLeft or Open Source"

An early personal attempt to create a term that distinguishes the FSF sense of "free software" from software that is given away at not cost, but without any rights to modify or redistribute it.

"Share-alike" describes the aspect of GNU and Creative Commons licenses which obligates those who distribute modifications to works to distribute them under the same license terms, thereby guaranteeing that innovation and creativity which builds upon share-alike works remains free.

Not all licenses for "open source" software are "share alike". BSD-style licenses, for example, grant users the right to modify and redistribute covered software, but do not obligate modifications to carry the same license. This allows such software to be included into non-free, proprietray works which provide none of the pertinent rights of free or open source software. Technically, this makes the software more free in many ways.

My own term; a broad umbrella encompassing all the issues of common freedoms in intellectual property, including software, media, and patents.

Copyleft is a term used in contrast with copyright. It's a recognition that in a very strict premissions culture, extraordinaty actions must be taken to protect freedom. "Copyleft" is usually an example of that extraordinary measure. Copyleft is not just placing a work in the public domain, where it can be mercilessly plundered by unscrupulous industrialists. Instead, it's copyright is retained, and licensed under terms just restrictive enough to ensure that the freedoms the author wishes to endow it are preserved.

Used in terms of free as in: beer, freedom, speech, and you.

"Free as in beer" is an effective, intuitive phrase describing software given away free of charge. "Free as in freedom" is the phrase that often accompanies it in elevator-pitch explanations of the difference between software that grants users rights to use, modification, and redistribution of the software, over and above being free of charge. This explanation is often necessary among English speakers, which don't distinguish between the Latin "gratis" (eg gratuity, gratitude) and "libre" (eg liberty, liberation).

My own form of this is "free as in you", which grew from the realization that the proper object of the adjective in question was not the software itself, but its users and developers. It is they who should be properly described as "free", more than the software. This provides a useful means of making the gratis/libre distinction. People have not been gratis since the abolition of slavery, so the meaning is clear.

This has also personally inspired a tendency to rephrase any references to "free software" as references to "free users", although this requires some interesting grammatical acrobatics. "Windows is not free software" might be more clearly said "Windows has no free users."

These terms are names for the lack of freedom.

Software whose usage, modification, and redistribution rights are strictly controlled by the developer is known as proprietary. Unlike non-free software, some of these rights may be granted without stripping it of it's proprietary nature.

In it's strictest sense "non-free" simply means having some ominous licensing terms. the pine mail reader of the University of Washington, for example, is considered non-free despite the fact it gives away its soruce code and allows redistribution, simply because it places restrictions on distribution of modifications.

The Debian Project, best known for it's foundational GNU\Linux distribution, maintains a brnach of it's software repository called non-free for software which is popular, but does not conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

According to Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, the advent of the term "Open Source" marked an important division within the community that, until that time, had been known as the free software community. While "free software" had placed its primary emphasis on the freedom of software's users and developers, "open source" advocates were mainly focused on the ability of open development processes to produce better quality software.

see Libre vs Gratis. Freeware is Gratis, whereas Free Software is also Libre.

Gratis_versus_Libre Also free as in beer vs free as in freedom/speech/you.

It is the share alike aspect of the GNU GPL that lead Microsoft's Steve Ballmer to call Linux (the famous GPL-licensed OS kernel) "...a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." The implication, coming from one software freedom's most rabid opponents, is that users and programmers are somehow coerced or tricked into ceding their rights in anything that "touches" share alike software when they choose to use or modify it. This is obviously absurd, but it makes a great headline. To be clear, share alike licenses do create obligations on the part of licensees, but the choice remains that of the redistributor, and it doesn't apply to as many things as Ballmer would have you believe.