You seem to be factually mistaken about an important point. Nobody, not even Richard Stallman or the FSF, uses the word &quot;free&quot; to mean &quot;copyleft&quot;. The two are distinct concepts.<p>For example the MIT license is free, but not copyleft. GPL is free and copyleft. Copyleft ensures that all the derived works (AND those derived from the derived etc.) must also be distributed with a free license.<p>In practice licenses that people call &quot;open source&quot; are almost always considered &quot;free&quot; by the FSF&#x27;s terms. I wouldn&#x27;t say it&#x27;s a very very specific brand of freedom. It&#x27;s all necessary to have the user in control. But I agree that &quot;free software&quot; is not a good name, due to misunderstandings about price. It could also be called &quot;user-freedom-respecting software&quot; or &quot;user-controlled software&quot; or &quot;the-users-have-the-final-say-in-how-their-computing-is-done-and-not-the-developer software&quot;, but it would be too long.