A natural way to analyse the electromagnetic response of a metal is by treating the conduction
electrons as ‘free charge’, as described in most textbooks. Some textbooks, such as the one by
Feynman (1965 The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley)), discuss another
approach, where the conduction electrons are effectively treated as ‘bound charge’. This is because
here one talks about the oscillating polarization of a metal when an alternating field is applied,
which results in a non-unity permittivity. In this paper, we perform a comparative analysis of these
two approaches. We explicitly show that although the two models give different values of
certain quantities, such as the conductivity and permittivity, the electric and magnetic fields as
well as the total current and heat dissipation are the same, as expected. The discussions presented
in the paper give some useful insights into the electrodynamics of conductors.