Excellent post Dave. Richard Stallman elucidated similar thoughts and someone even wrote a book titled ‘Free as in speech and beer.’

It should be noted that, in Open Source, the ‘free as in beer’ and ‘free as in speech’ intersect, JBoss, SugarCRM, MySQL are some of the more prominent examples.

Some other projects figure out how to monitize their work, like Mozilla foundation which received $52.9M in 2005 and $66.8M in 2006, mostly from the Google search bar. Their expenses were $19.77M in 2006. [blogs.zdnet.com]

Compare that to Microsofts Net Profit Margin of 29.3% and Pre-Tax Margin of 42% last year, which was better than their 5yr average.

Oh and my favorite browser, the closed source Opera browser, generates a significant portion of their revenue the same way Mozilla does, with the search bar.

And you also now know why so many ‘free’ software want to install a toolbar in your browser.

I’ve been meaning to write about Open Source and some of the misperceptions about it and your post just might be the motivation, once I find a few spare minutes.

I suspect that ‘free as in beer’ also originated from the old software company practice of getting a keg on Friday’s for everyone to drink as a reward.

Oh and La Fin du Monde is one of my favorite beers. When I first saw the name I knew I had to try it. A few beers later I renamed it ‘La fin du moi’