Perhaps Stallman and company could be forgiven for initially choosing a misleading term, but why haven't they made any effort to correct their terminology over the years?
Ehhhhh no, it was kind of the other way around. Here's a good article about the rebranding of "Open Source" away from "Free Software."
In the Beginning, everybody understood the "free as in beer and free as in speech" thing. To be honest, it's a wonderfully geeky nomenclature. Free has two (primary) meanings, both of which apply to our software! Using that one word saves bandwidth! But geeks are very poor at branding, or expecting other people to understand their precise use of words.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, Tim O'Reilly and pals redefined "free software" to mean what you think of today as "open source." They kept the "free as in beer" (design methodology) bit but jettisoned the "free as in speech" (social movement) bit because all that commie talk doesn't fly when they're trying to make a buck.
The FOSS community is not unaware of this, and has tried to counteract this with the word "libre," meaning "free as in liberty." But the damage is basically done. And besides, they were the Free Software Foundation first. Why should they have to change? They're not the ones who suck.
Note, in contrast, how vitally important precise and explicit terminology becomes to these folks when they want to receive what they believe to be adequate credit for "the GNU/Linux System". In that case, sloppy terminology like "Linux" simply cannot be tolerated.
No, like I said, the initial naming was good. It was Free. Free as in beer, free as in speech. That one word worked perfectly. Again, this is before the words were muddied to appeal to business interests.
They only call it "GNU/Linux" when you're talking about...GNU/Linux. Again, precise definition. You call your system "Linux" but all those commands you're typing, cp, mv, grep, are GNU. Linux is just the kernel. Android, however, is...the Android variant of Linux, and GNU makes no claim on it and doesn't expect you to call it GNU/Android because there's no GNU in it.
To me, their reaction to LLVM is the most telling sign I've seen yet of what's really important to them. It's all about ego.
No, absolutely not. What's really important to them is the principle of copyleft. That no, they will not compromise when it comes to the principles that free (libre) software must stay free (libre). Today candy, tomorrow shackles. In this world where freaking everybody compromises their principles, it's nice to see somebody who says "nope. Nope nope nope. This is what we believe, and we're sticking to it."
Did you read the rest of what I said about "embrace, extend, and extinguish?" Stallman takes the long view. I honestly have no idea what you're going for with the Apple bit. Apple closes their shit off, won't let you install what you want on your device, spies on you, hands that info to the government...they can take their "benefits" and cram them right up the ass of Steve Job's dessicated corpse.