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jiballast Monday at 6:33 PM1 replyview on HN

You are correct ... the other responses to you are not. "Free software" as in the FSF is "free as in freedom, not free as in free beer", which is why copyleft was invented, to establish such a distinction.


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tsimionesculast Monday at 7:15 PM

No, this is completely wrong. Free/libre software is distinguished from "gratis" software, such as demos or shareware. Any software that is freely available for users to legally modify and redistribute however they see fit, under the same license or some other, is free software.

Examples of non-free software are shareware like WinRar, software only available for non-commercial use like OMNeT++ [0], and (slightly more controversially) things like ElasticSearch or MongoDB.

[0] https://omnetpp.org/intro/license

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