I apologize for the hyperbole, but you are arguing my point: if something took "lots of federal grant money" to become usable in universities and amount to anything more than a research project, then we are no longer about something "free", are we?
From that point of view nothing that requires human input is free. Which is true in a sense, people are using free to mean free to use, not free to improve.
From that point of view nothing that requires human input is free. Which is true in a sense, people are using free to mean free to use, not free to improve.