Free software is typically described as "free as in freedom" or "free as in free beer". (This is probably a limitation of English tho, my language has 2 different words for permissions and costlessness.) GP above proposes the "free as in puppy" variant, which means that it is a burden of maintenance. I can't recall any real examples for this.
Sorry but no it doesn’t. These words have the other meanings you mentioned, but they don’t include either of the meanings of “free”.
If you said you were giving away “gratuitous software”, native English speakers wouldn’t know what you were talking about. The only way to understand it would be to realize that those words are etymologically cognate to words in European languages that do have those meanings.
"Gratuitous" also has that definition, though it's far less common in use. See the dictionary definition, e.g., here: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gratuitous
> 2. given, done, bestowed, or obtained without charge or payment; free; complimentary.
It's more of a stretch there, because the primary definition of gratuitous has a connotation of unnecessary, even undesirable. If you didn't have at least some hint of disapproval of a service, you'd reach for the word "free" long before "gratuitous".
Similarly you would say someone who’s gotten out of prison is now “free” (or libre in French or Spanish) but you wouldn’t say they’re “liberal”.
Strangely enough, I think the LaTex distribution qualifies, too. I tried to install it recently, and it wanted 1 GB of disk space! That's multiple times the size of the entire system disk when LaTeX was created...
Sooner or later a lot of the web is going to run on WASM, at which point we'll have a virtual machine running in a user program running on an OS which incompletely virtualizes the bare machine (hence why we've ended up with WASM). Extra gratuitousity if the browser is an Intel binary being run on an M* processor via Rosetta translation... Maybe eventually we'll realize that the OS needs to provide a full virtual machine, complete with window to draw in, filesystem isolation like Plan 9, etc. But, inertia will probably make it take while.
There is the TinyTeX distribution, which is smaller. (Despite its name, it isn't tiny, or small, or medium in size, but it is also large. But smaller than the default LaTeX distribution with all the possible packages, source code and documents.)
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118717/how-is-th...
