Xah Lee, 2010-09, 2011-02-02
We need to get this one out of the way. “Free as in speech” does not mean “free as in beer”, but in fact if you look for GPL software it is almost always “free as in beer”. It's not hard to see why. If you try to sell GPL software, it is possible for your punter to buy it, write some trivial change and resell it under GPL for less, undercutting you. By parity of reasoning this can be repeated down the chain until the price tends to zero. So designers using the GPL nearly always make their work free.
The above is excerpted from:
The Problems of Open Source (2009) By Dr Mark Tarver. @ Source: lambdassociates.org.
Mark Tarver is the creator of the Qi lisp language, a lisp variant based on Common Lisp and major functional lang features comparable to OCaml/F#, Haskell. (See also: Qi Language Logo)
Free Software proponents wouldn't admit, that if “FSF Free” Software is actually not $free$, it would immediately lose all its force, and become obscure perhaps within a year in human society. In other words, the $free$ is used to sell FSF's concept of “Software Freedom”, because otherwise this ideology has no place to go in the real world, much like the situation in communism (which in practice is forced upon people by dictators.).
Note that the word “communism” in Chinese is “共产主义”. The word 共 means “share; public”, the word 产 means “properties; resources; production”, the word 主义 means school of thought, philosophy.