No, the term "free software" was not invented by RMS. He's certainly championed it the most, but back then there simply was no other common term for this kind o

No, the term "free software" was not invented by RMS. He's certainly championed it the most, but back then there simply was no other common term for this kind of software. People were already using it long before he started using it or wrote the GNU manifesto or uttered a word about the topic. The term "open source", however was coined Eric Raymond and the Open Source Initiative. Nobody before OSI ever said "open source" to refer to software. The term was coined during a brainstorming session prior to the release of Mozilla. There is an unrelated, older occurrence of the term in "open source intelligence" which is about how to spy on people using publicly available sources, but nothing about software nor all the other things people mean with "open source" nowadays. As a marketing term, open source has met its goal admirably: it is a far more popular term than "free software", being used to describe many things and situations other than software, and many of them almost completely unrelated to anything that OSI originally intended.