Our choices are to use "open source", which more or less gets it across to lay people completely unaware of the subtleties, use "free software" and then launch into some long-form explanation of why we also charge money (of course anyone can grab the code for free and run their own instance but most of our customers don't care about any of that), or say FLOSS or Libre and it's totally unintelligible to most people and they stop paying attention before we've gotten anywhere.
Unfortunately I don't think this problem will be constructively progressed until it evolves past the realm of geeks arguing about it amongst themselves, and actually is approached as a marketing issue. Perhaps the reason the debate is still festering is there hasn't been much alignment of incentives between the marketers and the geeks to work together on it, because most software companies don't try to mutually hold the values of Free Software and commercial profit. But we won't see Free Software and its underpinning values go mainstream until that happens, and I think it would be good for everyone if it did.
Not that there wasn't ever software given away for free. There was source code published in magazines for the user to type in and compile for themselves, and there were friendly neighbors who would give you a program that they wrote for free. Even in the earliest years of the internet, people were sending their programs for free over the network.
But in a way, free-as-in-speech software predates free-as-in-beer software.
This started changing when computers became plentiful enough to sell to a mass market. Bill Gates certainly saw the profit in selling only software (I'm not saying he was the first to do so, but I do suspect he was among the first to do so).
Use a common word with positive meaning in your movement to cause confusion and they try to own the word.
It also easier to make your opponent looks bad. Saying a software isn't "free" makes other people feel like the software is bad when, in fact, it's only not their movement's definition of free.
Really? I've never seen that, except when the "other people" understand that to mean it doesn't fit the FSF's definition. People who don't know about the FSF's definition would just think it's paid software, not "bad", in my experience.
What software are you thinking that is considered "free" (and not in the sense of cost) by some people but doesn't fit the FSF's definition?
Software Freedom is a great term, but just works in some grammatical contexts. You can otherwise say "free/libre" or "free/libre/open" or "freedom-respecting"…