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The adjectivefree in English is commonly used in one of two meanings: "at no monetary cost" (gratis) or "with little or no restriction" (libre). This ambiguity can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is when dealing with laws concerning the use ofinformation, such ascopyright andpatents.
The termsgratis andlibre may be used to categoriseintellectual property likecomputer programs, according to thelicenses and legal restrictions that cover them, especially in thefree software and open source communities, as well as the broaderfree culture movement. For example, they are used to distinguish "freeware" (softwaregratis) fromfree software (softwarelibre).
Free software advocate andGNU founderRichard Stallman advocates usage of the slogan: "Think free as infree speech, not free beer."[1] This basically means: "Think free as inlibre, notgratis."
Gratis (/ˈɡrɑːtɪs/) in English is adopted from the variousRomance andGermanic languages, ultimately descending from the pluralablative anddative form of the first-declensionnoungrātia inLatin. It means "free" in the sense that something is supplied without need for payment, even though it may have value.
Examples of goods and services which are provided free of charge include:
Where products and services are labelled as "free" but some related costs need to be paid for such as packaging or administration charges, it would be potentially misleading to use the word "free" in relation to the product itself. In the UK, guidance on the use of the word "free" in advertising has been issued by theCommittee of Advertising Practice (CAP) and theBroadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP).[6]
Libre (/ˈliːbrə/) in English is adopted from the various Romance languages, ultimately descending from the Latin wordlīber; its origin is closely related toliberty. It denotes "the state of being free", as in "liberty" or "having freedom". TheOxford English Dictionary (OED) considerslibre to be obsolete,[7] but the word has come back into limited[a] use. Unlikegratis,libre appears in few English dictionaries,[a] although there is no other English single-word adjective signifying "liberty" exclusively, without also meaning "at no monetary cost".
In software development, where themarginal cost of an additional unit is zero, it is common for developers to make software available at no cost. One of the early and basic forms of this model is calledfreeware. With freeware, software is licensed only for personal use and the developer does not gain any monetary payment.
With the advent of thefree software movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly calledopen source orfree and open-source software (called FLOSS, FOSS, or F/OSS). As the English adjectivefree does not distinguish between "for free" and "liberty", the phrases "free as in freedom of speech" (libre, free software) and "free as in free beer" (gratis, freeware) were adopted. Many in the free software movement feel strongly about thefreedom to use the software, make modifications, etc., whether or not this freely usable software is to be exchanged for money. Therefore, this distinction became important.
"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.
These phrases have become common, along withgratis andlibre, in the software development and computer law fields for encapsulating this distinction.[b] The distinction is similar to the distinction made inpolitical science betweenpositive liberty andnegative liberty. Like "free beer", positive liberty promises equal access by all without cost or regard to income, of a given good (assuming the good exists). Like "free speech", negative liberty safeguards the right to use of something (in this case, speech) without regard to whether in a given case there is a cost involved for this use.[c]
In order to reflect real-world differences in the degree of open access, the distinction between gratis open access and libre open access was added in 2006 byPeter Suber andStevan Harnad, two of the co-drafters of the originalBudapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access publishing.[9] Gratis open access refers to online access free of charge (which Wikipedia indicates with the icon
), and libre open access refers to online access free of charge plus some additional re-use rights (Wikipedia icon
).[9] Libre open access is equivalent to the definition of open access in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, theBethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and theBerlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specificCreative Commons licenses;[10] these almost all requireattribution of authorship to the original authors.[9][11]
The original gratis/libre distinction concerns software (i.e., code), with which users can potentially do two[citation needed] kinds of things: 1. access and use it; and 2. modify andre-use it. "Gratis" pertains to beingable to access and use the code, without a price-barrier, while "libre" pertains to beingallowed to modify and re-use the code, without a permission barrier. The target content of theopen access movement, however, is not software but published,peer-reviewed research journal article texts.[12]
The formalanalogy between open software and open access has been made,[14] along with the generalization of the gratis/libre distinction from the one field to the other.
This article incorporates text published under the BritishOpen Government Licence: Clement, M.,The founding of the NHS: 75 years on,GOV.uk blog, published on 13 July 2023, accessed on 3 July 2025
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