Question 1

Does open source mean free?

Accepted Answer

Not necessarily, and the confusion comes from English using one word for two different things. The standard clarification is **"free as in speech, not free as in beer"**.

**Open source means the source code is available**, and — under the Open Source Initiative's definition — that you may use, study, modify and redistribute it. Those are freedoms about **what you can do with the code**, not a statement about price.

In practice most open source software is available at no cost, because anyone who receives it may redistribute it, which makes charging for copies difficult. But you can legitimately sell open source software, and companies do — usually charging for support, hosting, certification or enterprise features rather than the code itself.

**Licences differ substantially**, and this matters if you build on them:

**Permissive licences** (MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD) let you do almost anything, including using the code in proprietary closed-source products, provided you preserve the notice.

**Copyleft licences** (GPL) require that derivative works you distribute are also released under the same licence. This is deliberate — it propagates the freedoms — and it means GPL code cannot be incorporated into closed-source products you distribute. **AGPL** extends this to software provided over a network, closing the loophole where a company modifies GPL code and offers it as a service without distributing it.

**"Source available" is not open source.** Licences like the Business Source License or SSPL publish code while restricting commercial use or competing services. Several companies have relicensed from open source to these, which is legal and widely contested.

**Practical points:** free of charge is not free of cost — support, integration and maintenance are real. Open source is not automatically more or less secure. And check the licence before building a business on something.

Question 2

What is the difference between proprietary, permissive and copyleft licences?

Accepted Answer

What you are permitted to do with the software, and — critically for the last of them — what you must do if you distribute your own version. Proprietary. The copyright holder grants a limited licence

Question 3

What is the difference between free and paid antivirus software?

Accepted Answer

The core detection engine is usually the same in both tiers from a given vendor. Paid versions add features around it rather than better malware detection, which is the opposite of what the marketing

Question 4

What does 'open weights' mean, and is it the same as open source?

Accepted Answer

No. Open weights means the trained model parameters are downloadable; open source, in its established meaning, requires considerably more — and the distinction is actively contested because a great

Question 5

What is vendor lock-in, and how do you avoid it?

Accepted Answer

A situation where the cost of leaving a supplier exceeds the benefit of doing so — not because a contract forbids it, but because migration is expensive, risky or technically impractical. It is

Question 6

Why does AI cost so much to run?

Accepted Answer

Because every single response requires substantial computation on expensive, power-hungry hardware — and unlike most software, the cost does not fall as usage grows, which breaks the economics people

Question 7

What is DRM, and why does content you bought disappear?

Accepted Answer

Digital rights management is technology restricting how digital content can be used, copied and accessed. Its existence is why "buying" digital content frequently does not mean what the button says.

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