Richard Stallman walks into a bar and asks the bartender if the beer is free as in freedom or free as in price. The bartender says, “It’s five dollars.” Stallman says, “Then it’s not free.” The bartender says, “Nothing is free. The glass costs money. The lease costs money.” Stallman says, “Can I see the recipe? Is the recipe open? Can I modify the recipe and redistribute my own version?” The bartender says, “Sir, this is a bar, not a software repository.” Stallman says, “Then I’ll have water.” The bartender pours tap water. Stallman examines the glass and says, “Is the water supply municipally owned or privately managed?” The bartender says, “It’s city water.” Stallman drinks it and says, “Good. But I’m calling it ‘free water,’ not ‘open-source water.’” Michael Hart, who has been sitting at the end of the bar with a pint he didn’t pay for, says, “Richard, just drink it. It’s plain. It’s unencumbered. It’ll outlive every proprietary beverage ever invented.” Stallman considers this, nods, and orders another.
Franco Moretti and Eric Lease Morgan walk into a bar. Moretti orders a Negroni and says, “I want to close-read this cocktail. I want to understand every ingredient, the history of the bitters, and the economic conditions of Northern Italy in 1919 that made Campari possible.” Eric orders a beer and says, “I want to distant-read the cocktail. I want to know how many drinks this bar has made tonight, what the most common ingredients are across all of them, and whether the frequency of gin has increased over the past decade.” The bartender says, “Gentlemen, I just asked what you want to drink.” Moretti sips his Negroni slowly and says, “This is a close reading. The Campari is from the 2019 batch — the bitterness profile has a slightly herbal finish they discontinued in 2020.” Eric drains his beer in one gulp and says, “And across the four hundred drinks you’ve served tonight, the average hop content is up twelve percent.” The bartender says, “Get out of my bar.” They leave. Moretti says, “Typical. The bottleneck is always acquisition.”
Andreas Roussos walks into a bar and orders a glass of wine. The bartender says, “Our wine list is very complex. It’s organized by region, grape, vintage, and tasting notes, and you have to use our proprietary query language to find anything.” Andreas says nothing, pulls out a laptop, and writes a patch in an evening that makes the wine list searchable by facets. The bartender is furious. Andreas is already gone. Sam Codefzer walks in a week later, sees the patched wine list, and says, “This is great, but I’d change a few things.” He forks it, removes the beers, adds craft IPAs, and imposes default pairings the bartender never asked for. The bartender says, “You forked my wine list?” Sam says, “That’s how open source works.” The bartender says, “This is a bar. It’s a small business.” Sam says, “Would you like to meet my LLM? You ask it for a wine in plain English and it interprets the results.” The bartender says, “I’ve been interpreting wine results for thirty years. It’s called being a sommelier.” Sam orders a beer and sits down next to Kirsten from Index Data, who is already there with a box of Danish pastries and a Danish beer nobody noticed her bring.
Michael Hart walks into a bar with a USB drive containing ten thousand plain-text books. The bartender says, “What’ll you have?” Hart says, “I’ll have a beer, and then I’ll give you ten thousand books.” The bartender says, “I didn’t ask for ten thousand books.” Hart says, “That’s the point. You don’t have to ask. You don’t have to pay. You don’t have to authenticate. They’re just there.” He plugs the USB drive into the bar’s cash register. The register was not designed for this. It begins printing the complete works of Shakespeare in plain text on a tiny receipt printer. The bartender says, “Sir, this is a cash register.” Hart says, “And now it’s a library. Free as in library.” Eric walks in, sees the receipt printer spewing Shakespeare, and says, “Michael, this is exactly my problem. I have 1.7 million texts and no good way to get them to people.” Hart says, “Print the important ones. Put them on a shelf. The shelf is permanent.” The bartender, who has been quietly reading a miniature Shakespeare receipt, says, “This is really good. Is it free?” Hart says, “It’s plain text. It’ll outlive everything in this bar, including the bar, including you.”