Free Code

= TL;DR The neologism Free Code is just another way of saying the same thing people mean when they use the more common phrases Free Software (*not* freeware) and Open source.

Note:The letters in these phrases are capitalized following a suggestion by Bruce Perens that this would make their meaning as terms of art clearer.

Description

Danyl Stripe:

"It's an accident of history that when a name was needed for the US organization that champions the software freedoms of people using computer, the founders chose "Free Software Foundation", not "Software Freedom Foundation". Because of that naming choice, software freedom activists spend an inordinate amount of time explaining that when we talk about 'Free Software", we're talking about "free as in speech, not free as in beer". Another consequence of this confusion was the meeting where the phrase 'Open Source' was coined by Christine Peterson, leading to the creation of the Open Source Definition (based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines drafted by Bruce Perens), and the founding of the Open Source Initiative. This led to a period of competition for thought leadership of the software freedom movement, between the FSF (broadly representing the anti-corporate factions) and OSI (broadly representing the corporate-friendly and money-curious factions), with one side claiming that "open source misses the point" and the other side calling them "neckbeards" and so on.

'Free Code' is a neologism I coined in an attempt to bridge the divide. Unlike Open Source, and other compromise terms like FOSS, FLOSS, and FLO, it includes the word "free", emphasizing our freedoms to use, study, share, modify, and redistribute the code. Unlike Free Software though, it clarifies that the software or service may not be free-of-charge ("free as in beer"), because it's the code they are made from that is free ("as in speech"). To run with the beer metaphor, water is free (or at least it ought to be), but people may charge you for brewing it into drinkable beer, or delivering that beer to where you drink it."

- Danyl Strype, 2026