The Many Flavors of Free

Lawrence Lessig is a pretty visible figure in the discussion of copy rights, privileges and freedoms. He's pushing for real creative development and ease of exploration within a cross-disciplinary media culture implied by electronic communities (collectively known as the Internet ;) What Creative Commons and other licenses like GNU provide is an outlet for multimedia artists and computer programmers to share their work openly while opting to maintain a bit of control over the potential of being ripped off. While they may provide their software and source for free, they may be free of implying any sort of warranty. Even when free, they may also demand that it never be modified. They could demand that even if modified and redistributed, it never be sold (become payware). Other creators may opt to release all rights - allowing anyone to profit from or re-engineer the software or media as they see fit. To me, the best flavors of free are those that promote more freedom. Applications like DVDShrink are not open-source, but are completely free to use and are incredibly well designed and updated. They are often built off open-source code distributed under a flexible license. Other apps, like Apache, PHP, and OpenOffice, are direct competitors to payware that dominate PC's worldwide. Keeping them free provides an alternative to the high costs imposed by the big boys, but it also encourages the community to improve the products themselves. Sure, software developers deserve some dough too, so many will find ways to attach paid services to their products instead of destroying their manifestos of information freedom. Why shouldn't you go free? Maybe because transparency breeds knowledge. But who should you really trust? Your payware probably has more security holes, anyway.