[HCoop-Discuss] Think of free speech, not free beer.

[Justin S. Leitgeb]

With the recent talk about hosting rates, I think that we may be 
neglecting what could be one of the most significant cooperative 
movements in recent history -- the open source movement.  In open source 
software, the mantra, "Think of free speech, not free beer", has been an 
important aspect of the movement.  I want to spend a moment thinking 
about how we can use the same philosophical orientation to benefit HCoop 
in our own pricing schema.

Currently, HCoop has a set of open-source tools, written by Adam and 
others, that allow users great freedom to configure internet services.  
This kind of freedom has allowed numerous members to set up dynamic web 
sites that not only benefit the individual users on our site, but the 
internet community as a whole.  One of the greatest strengths of our 
cooperative has been this freedom, and I think that we should spend 
significant effort to maintain and expand it.

The other part of the open-source mantra cited above claims that we 
should de-emphasize the notion of something being free in terms of 
monetary price.  As everyone involved in HCoop is aware, hardware, 
bandwidth, and (occasionally) professional services do cost money, and 
in this sense particularly our cooperative cannot be free (pending a 
unexpected, huge donation from a benevolent member or outsider).

Recently, members of the cooperative have been discussing where to draw 
the line between members who pay a "base" price and having to pay for 
additional features or capacity for their own sites or personal usage.  
Based on the emphasis on free speech, rather than free beer, that has 
been a guiding principle of open-source software, and my own 
observations of how current users are benefiting from our systems, I 
think that all current HCoop users should be given the same freedom to 
use the resources that we have put together, for the same cost 
(distributed evenly among members, with some donating money to offset 
costs in the transitional period that we are going through now).

In the future, it is possible that a large site or organization will 
want to use our services, or that an existing site will expand to 
require more resources than what we can provide based on our basic 
membership rates.  When that time comes, we will have to make a decision 
about if we can support the high-volume site, and if so, if we should 
either subsidize it with on existing or increased member dues, or if we 
should have that user or organization pay higher dues.  It is my opinion 
that we are still far from having to make this decision in regards to a 
particular site or user.

In conclusion, there is a kind of freedom that is able to be separated 
from monetary price that has been a philosophical underpinning of the 
open source software movement.  The fact that our cooperative is "free" 
in terms of freedom given to members to customize services, while 
de-emphasizing (as much as is reasonably possible) the monetary price 
that is necessary to maintain the aforementioned kind of freedom, has 
led to the success of our cooperative.  By providing a base price for 
membership that allows for all of the existing freedoms that users have, 
our organization keeps this important philosophical emphasis on "free 
speech" rather than "free beer".  By saying that the cooperative 
reserves the right to re-evaluate any site at any time to see if they 
fall outside of what we can reasonable support, while maintaining "free 
speech" and a reasonable base cost for all members, we allow ourselves 
the ability to cooperatively decide what to do in the inevitable case 
that a particular site falls outside of our ability to support it 
without increasing dues or compromising the most important kind of 
freedom for our movement and the internet community.

Justin S. Leitgeb