Do you mean free as in beer, or free as in speech here? I'm still honing my understanding of FOSS, and I'm not 100% sure that FOSS means free as in beer.
> I'm not 100% sure that FOSS means free as in beer.
It doesn't. The only requirements for licenses like GPL, etc. is that anyone who you distribute a binary to can ask you for the source code, and you must provide it for a reasonable fee (for GPL it's "for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source", and you must provide the source on request for as long as you offer support for the binary blob, with a minimum of three years).
Can't find it now, but I recall finding a link here (by the developer(s) of curl iirc) about how his BMW had a screen with the free software credits and BMW sent him a CD with the source when he requested it.
Edit: couldn't find that BMW article, but here are a few interesting links related to that:
The ability to somehow acquire the source is one of the requirements, but from the making money PoV it is not that significant.
What is significant for this discussion is that another GPL requirement is that whoever you distribute software to is permitted to redistribute however they see fit.
Free software is about freedoms, but also tends to be available for free. Consider this: if I sold a piece of free software for $1000 and the buyer was free to share its source code, wouldn't they? Even if no actual user shared the code, a trader could buy the software and sell it onward for $500 to as many people as possible. The next trader would buy for $500 and sell copies for $100, etc.
Now, the software might be difficult to build or run or use, and the vendor might be actually selling binaries, or the software as a service, or documentation, or consultation, etc. Those can be valid business models even if the source code is freely available.
So theoretically, yes, free software could cost money. But its source code tends to be free as in beer, too. Freedom is much more valuable than the saved money, and that's why free beer gets scoffed at.
