Free Beer

Describe FreeBeer here. Most of what follows is cute, but meaningless, drollery. See FreeAsInBeer.

Certainly. Free Beer is beer that originally had been confined to a cask or stein or mug, but due to sloppy handling has escaped.

No, no - FreeBeer is a command, not a noun. It's telling you to go and liberate beer from its captors ...

• No. FreeBeer (properly written free(beer)) is a function call in CeeLanguage telling the runtime library to deallcoate the block of memory pointed to by the pointer "beer". "beer" must be a pointer returned by a previous call to "malloc" and which hasn't already been freed. Freeing beer twice is a notorious source of bugs in C programs. More modern programming languages use automatic BeerCollection? (think of waiters bussing the tables) to ensure that any unclaimed beer is automatically returned to the keg. After all, it's bad enough to run out of beer; it's worse when you discover that the reason you ran out is due to a BeerLeak?.
  • Not to deteriorate this highbrow page any further, but, I regularly free(beer) a second time else my bladder would burst!

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The FreeSoftwareFoundation likes to emphasize that "free software" means "Free as in speech", not "free as in beer".

What, pray tell, is wrong with free beer? nothing!

See, Stallman and company are trying to run this pub. A few of the wealthier patrons pay the rent on the building. The beer is free, but, the customers are expected to periodically drop off a case of meticulously crafted righteous homebrew. There are usually some great varieties of homegrown hops and barley at the pub that customers can take home to put into their lovingly created sudsy wonders.

Why?