> But if it contains no judgement, then what's the point?

I would flip the question around. We've seen a number of companies like Mongo put real effort into claiming that they should be considered Free (as in speech) software. They didn't have to do that, but they thought it was worthwhile to do so.

My feeling is that the philosophical distinction does matter, or else people and companies wouldn't get so bent out of shape when it's pointed out that their licenses are philosophically different. There is a lot of reputation and public perception rolled up into words like "Free/Libre content", and into words like "Open Source".

I am, to a certain degree, genuinely sorry that "Free" as it is used here has an inherent positive connotation. But also, it's not our fault that society standardized around a word that had a positive connotation. And it is not true at all that the entirety of the positive connotation around Free/Libre software came from the word "Free", Open Source advocates have fought hard to distinguish between Freedom and commercial cost.

You're right that this is a fight over connotations, that's all it is. But you're wrong in saying that there's not a fundamental difference between GPL and Non-Commercial licenses. Being able to accurately and quickly describe, label, and search for a category of software/content is important, and it is valid to be upset about putting a ton of activism and time into building a category of software/content, and then having a bunch of other people come in who fundamentally do not understand why those distinctions exist or why they matter -- and then for those people to argue that they get to use those connotations now, and Free Software advocates need to go away and start over from scratch if they want new terms that describe what they mean by "freedom".

You're also right that Freedom is a continuum, but you're wrong that this means we should stop trying to define the word. Right now we're fighting over whether Non-Commercial licenses are "Free". There are licenses that do not even meet the minimum CC definitions that want to label themselves as Free. There are music licenses that openly label themselves as Copyright Free that have restrictions on whether they can be shared or where they can be embedded or streamed, even for Non-Commercial products. They want (and in fact are) also participating in this debate.

So because this a continuum, and because there really is no clear, universal cutoff point where we can say something isn't Free, there is thus a large benefit in setting up a clear standard to prevent the continual erosion of the word "Free". There is a large benefit in being able to search for terms like "Open Source" or "Free/Libre" being confident that you'll get back a category of content/software that will meet at least a minimum standard threshold for what rights they'll guarantee.

See also words like Vegan. Reducing animal harm is a continuum as well. There are different standards of Veganism, and grey areas where different people disagree on what does and doesn't count. Different parts of the Vegan world are more strict about wax coatings and micro-ingredients. But broadly, we still have a cutoff point where almost across the board we don't consider stuff like beeswax to be Vegan. And if someone comes and argues that animal harm is a continuum and we're just arguing over connotations and definitions, and a piece of food that's vegan but has honey is still better than a steak, my response is going to be, "yeah, so? What's your point?" We want a category that makes it easy to find stuff in the grocery store, and we want a well-defined standard so we can narrow down where people are on that continuum of reducing harm. The same is true of Open Source and Libre software.