Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre… that’s a phrase that’s been echoing through my mind today. Why? Because it’s hard to put value on something until

a.) It’s gone

or

b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

It’s part of the human condition, I’d say, we take stuff for granted when it’s abundant and freely-available and then when it’s gone and is no longer free we start to miss it, it becomes an issue of scarcity. Two situations that ride this median between scarcity and abundance come to mind, both of which are music listening-oriented.

The first is a story of my local public radio station in East Lansing, WKAR, licensed through Michigan State University ran Music from the Hearts of Space for years. I donated regularly because I wanted to support the programming, specifically HOS, as it’s referred to by fans such as myself, but then one day it happened, and HOS was pulled. What could I have done? I don’t know. I did contact station management, and received the standard “budget cuts” reply, fact-based, to be sure, but not very helpful. Bummer.

The second story has to do with Pandora, the excellent music player that came out of the Music Genome Project. I’ve cultivated an excellent playlist on Pandora over the last couple years, and it’s a music outlet I hope not to lose. However, recently they started advertising and introduced a premium service. I’m going to sign up for the premium service, almost certainly, but it got me thinking about what’s lost when you don’t lend your support, and sometimes even when you do. This takes me back to my opening points, I talked about the bummer of losing HOS, which was free, abundant and easily taken for granted. However, it’s the second point that I think of when Pandora comes to mind – b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

When something goes from being free to costing money, no matter how good it was for free, it was just free so how you could make demandments, and have expectations, but when you’re a paying customer you expect a say, you expect a great product, a product worth paying for; the algorithms that brought you Yanni when you were trying to enhance your Harold Budd playlist just aren’t as acceptable when you’re paying. The whole mindset changes.

This is one of the things I love about Google. No matter how much free stuff they give out (of course it’s not just out of the goodness their corporate heart), they don’t slouch on their offerings because they’re free. They beat expectations, they give you stuff you want before you even know you want it. Thankfully, they’ve found revenue streams outside of their software, unlike Pandora, which is the revenue stream like many other software as service Web sites.

Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre, as I’m thinking about it now, means that something is free of a price, monetary or otherwise, but with regard to libre, it’s totally free and price can’t be attached to it. That was the experience of HOS on the radio, and Pandora when it was ad-free — Libre… However, for a time, it was gratis, too… More thoughts on difference, here.

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One Response to “Free as in gratis, free as in libre.”

1. niche keywords guide says:

   January 9, 2010 at 5:45 am

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