Perception of the license and its uses has evolved beyond the barriers of what’s written in the Creative Commons code of law. The “open purists,” as I call them, have equated free and open. To them, you can’t have one without the other. The thought leaders have succeeded in widening the scope of the open license to include a requirement of free. It’s not good enough that the user has control of the content—it must be made widely available, with no barriers.
Although different definitions are used, free content is legally similar if not identical to open content. An analogy is the use of the rival terms free software and open source which describe ideological differences rather than legal ones.
Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the freedoms mentioned above. Because copyright law in most countries by default grants copyright holders monopolistic control over their creations, copyright content must be explicitly declared free, usually by the referencing or inclusion of licensing statements from within the work.
Commercializing open content is controversial to them. There are signs that Creative Commons agrees, or is at least open to having the discussion. See my next post, Dissing the Non-Commercial Clause, for evidence of this.