A common phrase you may hear in discussions of openness is “free as in speech or free as in beer?” to distnguish between the freedom of restrictions vs the ultimate low price.
What do you think is a good way to fill in the blank for talking about open education?
Free as in “freedom” — based on the official GNU Head logo originally created by Etienne Suvasa and re-drawn by Peter Garwinski; available under the GNU General Public License
This was coined by Richard Stallman and is embodied in the philosophy of the Free Software Foundation, also framed as gratis vs libre.
As a reference, the Free Software Definition includes four essential freedoms. What happens if you replace “software” with “education”?
A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms.
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