I've long felt that RMS/FSF's very specific and nonintuitive usage of "free" was intended to be misleading. If someone says "free" (which has many, many different meanings, all positive) when they really mean "copyleft" (which has one very complicated meaning), they're not trying to clarify anything, rather they're trying to muddy the waters so that people who don't understand copyleft or the FSF's political philosophy might think it's much simpler and much less specifically (and restrictively) defined than it actually is. Even the phrase "free as in freedom" doesn't actually disambiguate it, as it's a very specific type of very atypically defined freedom.
It always felt like a certain type of PR strategy, where the intent is to intentionally mislead people who aren't paying close attention, and that's always rubbed me the wrong way. Source: observing 3 decades of neverending confusion, flamewars, and arguments over this very topic.
It always felt like a certain type of PR strategy, where the intent is to intentionally mislead people who aren't paying close attention, and that's always rubbed me the wrong way. Source: observing 3 decades of neverending confusion, flamewars, and arguments over this very topic.