The word "liberal" definitely has the same definition of "libre"--ever hear of the term "liberal democracy"? That's exactly the same kind free they're talking about.

"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".

"Gratuitous software" would be excessive and unnecessary software. Which I think a lot of commercial (particularly "news") websites qualify for, and "modern" websites in general. NPM makes it easy to just install something, which requires all kinds of other things, which duplicate each other, etc.

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.