IBM discovers free-as-in-beer software

IBM in January began giving away its low-end Express-C version of its DB2 database at no cost. But to hear Big Blue tell it, the company isn't just promoting its products by giving them away for free, it's pioneering an innovative adaptation of the open-source software movement.

"We're using the open-source licensing model but not the development model. We've learned we can separate the two," said Scott Handy, IBM's senior vice president of Linux and open source, in a news conference here at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo on Tuesday. By offering the software without charging a license fee, "We're testing the business-model side of open source," he said.

One of the merits of open-source software is indeed that, being free, anyone can download it and try it out. But cost isn't the defining definition of open-source software or its progenitor, "free software" espoused by the Free Software Foundation. As FSF founder Richard Stallman is fond of saying, his movement emphasizes "free as in spech, not free as in beer."

Those freedoms include developers' rights to copy, modify and distribute the software's underlying source code--rights that definitely don't come with DB2 or with other freely available but proprietary software such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer.