I don't usually tackle topics that are this overtly philosophical. (Do I?) But I figured, I would like to give this one a shot.
I'll employ my favorite trick of referring to existing dictionary definitions (and especially etymologies). (My other favorite trick is to refer to made-up etymologies.) I'll look at a few words that I think are relevant.
Thus, I'd say that "free" means: to be able to do as one likes, that which is within one's power. ("Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" may have some built-in redundancy.) The run continues along "license", to "leisure", and thereby to "scholar", with the notion of "being permitted to do something" taking the fore.
Following the note, this understanding of "freedom" is rather more of an understanding of "liberty". This understanding of freedom seems relevant to Free Software, which puts one at liberty to do certain things.
The notion of "civil liberty",
seems like an important usage for understanding "free as in free software", the difference being that with "software liberty", one is permitted to modify code, not government. The notion of "free modifiability" has been seized as a key notion for FAIF advocates, but one should remember that it is not the only relevant freedom. (The right to redistribute is probably equally important.)
I would like to point out the thought that scholarship may actually be a sort of "meta-freedom". What do you do when you don't have anything you're obliged to do? Learn about or figure out new things to do, of course!
Here, I'm thinking that the notion that "liberties" (as in Go) and "degrees of freedom" (as in Mechanics) are important. One can only freely do things that one can do at all. In particular, one can not do things that one does not know about, or things that have somehow been "used up", precluded, or otherwise ruled out. Thus, "obligations" are locally (either in time or space or what have you) contradictory to freedom - though globally, the fulfillment of a particular obligation or series of obligations may be the only way to make some activity or other possible.
I have thought about this question for years, and I keep coming back to a definition of freedom as the absence of coercion. The nice thing about this definition is that coercion is a human, social construct, so we are immediately dropping problems with conflating natural and social freedom. Inasmuch as we are limited by unintentional situations, random chance, and natural events, our freedom from coercion has not been reduced. Freedom from coercion is also important in that it is the kind of freedom we have in our power to change, by changing how society is structured.
I'm not sure how much finding the right definition of freedom really matters for the work on this site, however. I think just separating out the above "libre" freedom from "gratis" freedom takes care of much disambiguation when it comes to CBPP. --akrowne Sat Apr 16 16:28:19 UTC 2005
The absence of coercion seems like a good definition of "freedom", and I think it is probably more along the lines of an actual definition than what I wrote above, which, like I said, is more like a definition of "liberty".
The relevance to this site, as I see it: to help us define complicated and potentially confusing terms like "free culture". Furthermore, basic (legal) definitions of freedom do suffice for making "free content" in general. However, I think it is good for us to think about the different kinds of freedom that are relevant to different kinds of content.
The liberty-based definition above is pretty strongly oriented towards the notion of the hyperreal - like Neo says at the end of "The Matrix",
This quote ties in nicely with the a non-coercion-based definition too, of course. Indeed, "The Matrix" seems to tie these two notions of freedom together in an interesting way. One can apparently be non-free, and possibly free, without necessarily being aware of the fact, which is kind of interesting. These fun questions would bear further inventigation - but maybe we need a PlanetPhilosophy on which to talk about them :).
My definition above is related to the idea that there are many different kinds of "freedom". This is something that I hadn't really thought about before writing the HDM non-manifesto.
As a short followup to your comment (that I just thought of), maybe it is good to have a definition that encompasses both natural and social freedom, then further distinctions can be made by applying modifiers. I purposefully tried to make my definition fairly metaphysical (i.e. something that would apply to various sorts of agents in various sorts of scenarios, not necessarily human or societal ones). This sort of generality could be a strength (flexible!) or a weakness (non-intuitive and sketchy!) or both.
(I don't want to split hairs about it here, but perhaps on PlanetPhilosophy later. :)) --jcorneli Sat Apr 16 18:14:55 2005 UTC