I’ve now been at Olin for more than five years. Every month, I get a copy of Frankly Speaking pinned up right by my office door. The first thing I do is to read the headline of the front-page article, mostly because it’s the largest, most eye-catching thing. But the next thing I do is see the phrase written in the upper right hand corner: “Free, as in beer”. 

I have three major problems with this phrase, and because this has annoyed me so much for so long, I’m going to use this very platform to describe each of those in as much detail as one does when wasting time while waiting for some torrents to finish downloading intensive data processing to finish running. (Should’ve written it in C++ instead of Python, but oh well.) 

First: of course it’s free. I’m not expecting the Association of Frankly Speaking Editors, Emeritus to suddenly send me a massive bill for all of the issues that I’ve taken and placed in a pile somewhere on my desk and not cleaned since 2022. At least, I hope not. 

Second: there’s a troubling implication made by this phrase. To understand this, it’s helpful to know where the phrase actually comes from. It’s from the Free Software Foundation, at least as I understand it, but since I’m not going to go through a bunch of their webpages to figure out where the quote comes from, I’ll just tell you that I copied this quote from a Wikipedia article: 

“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis. 

The problem with this phrase is that the term “free beer” is contrasted with “free speech”, and between those two, a newspaper that is arguably a bastion of free speech has decided to bill itself (no pun intended) with…the other definition of “free”. Also, does this mean that Frankly Speaking isn’t free as in free speech? 

Third, and finally: beer is most definitely not free. Where the hell are you guys getting your beer?