Free as in ... the first one's free.

Freedom is not something, its a relative lack of oppression, and what you tell young men you are about to get them killed for. There is no freedom, there is just less lousy code posing as a commercially viable business. When did compilation become "Digital Rights Management"? "If we gave you the source we'd have no protection from ...", people discovering that we haven't done anything interesting or novel, and haven't even followed reasonable industry best practices. RedHat operates very similarly to other software companies, the fact that source code is available does not give them unenforceable Intellectual Property claims. Further, downstream projects from them give them vast marketing benefits, so much so, that Sun, the company who's unhappy customers make up the bulk of RedHat's happy customer base, has tried to make Solaris, their flagship OS, an Open Source project. Yet there are still people who believe that there are hundreds of thousands of idealists sitting at home at night in their parents basement, hacking out these projects strictly for the joy of sticking it to "the man", who is strangely, Bill Gates. I suppose that its not surprising that people have misconceptions, the number one corporate-ladder-climbing marketing-droid in the industry, Steve Ballmer, insists that Open Sourcing Windows would eliminate free soda on their campus. Did the soda fountain at Sun dry up the moment they angered the gods of corporate greed by Open Sourcing (after a fashion) Solaris. I am gonna go out on a limb and say there's no casual relationship between source code availability and the price of soda in the cafeteria. Misconceptions abound for lots of issues, what I don't understand is how so many people with no concept of what software development entails have such strong opinions about the obvious business impact of opening up one's code, almost always with a very direct linear relationship between Open Source and Bankruptcy. Freedom is strictly propaganda, its been driving the war industry for a very long time, software development that doesn't insist we "Ignore that man behind the curtain", whose product can be taken apart and rebuilt over and over isn't Free(tm), its Better.