I don't think there is any way of describing that something is free of
charge better than using the word "free". Your suggestion, "available",
doesn't serve the purpose: it applies just as well to software that
costs money ("available for only $19.95") as software that doesn't.
Other possibilities would be "Price: Zero" or "Price: $0", but neither
of those would work in headings or in the navigation pane ("Get $0
Software"), and currency would also be hard to localize.
On the flip side, it is unfortunate that the FSF and its associates use
the term "free software" in a sense that cannot be understood without
explanation. I habitually used "free software" too, right up until the
moment when I came to design the license presentation in this program
and realized, oh crap, hardly anyone is going to understand that. This
wouldn't be the first time a term coined by Richard Stallman has
succumbed to contact with the real world, and it probably won't be the
last. Fortunately in this case, though, we have an alternative in "open
source" -- where even if people don't yet know what it means, at least
they're much less likely to mislead themselves.
No matter how much you or I care about software licensing, more people
care more about its price. There are various ways we can nudge people
towards caring more about licensing (see the Hardware Drivers window for
a slightly overwrought example), and I look forward to designing future
features that will help people keep track of which proprietary packages
they have installed, whether any of those have open-source equivalents,
and so on. But in this case we really do need to use the word "free" as
in price. Sorry.
** Changed in: software-center (Ubuntu)
Status: Incomplete => Invalid
--
Software Center should not use the word "Free Software"
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/442882
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