Richard Stallman

Stallman supplies one of the load-bearing framings for Open Source economics in Kyle’s wiki. As quoted in Working in Public, when he first described free software as “free as in speech, not free as in beer,” the distinction was that “free” referred to what one could do with the software — the freedom to use and modify it — rather than to its price. That phrasing anchors the Open Source concept page, where it’s set against later reframings like Jacob Thornton’s “free as in puppy” (open-sourcing as adopting a cute puppy that grows into a maintenance burden), which complicates Stallman’s clean liberty framing with the ongoing cost of stewardship.

Context: Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation, originating the free software movement and the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Where this appears

• Working in Public — quoted on the “free as in speech, not free as in beer” distinction.
• Open Source — the same distinction anchors the concept page’s framing of what “free” means.