To say freesync is free is like saying your brand new car came with two years free servicing. The service isn't free as the cost is included in purchase price of the car in the same way freesync isn't cost free as adding a displayport to a monitor has cost in itself and to even be able use DP you need to belong to vesa group and purchase the latest spec (thats how vesa makes its money to continue development of DP).
Saying that freesync is a lot more elegant then gsync sort of reminds of when sli and crossfire hit the market to use crossfire you needed a master card and an external dvi cable to connect the two cards. This time it's AMD who have got it right first time around.
It's perfectly obvious to everyone what is meant by free when talking about freesync, someone will surely come along and say you can't have freesync without buying a monitor at some point. AMD could charge to license Freesync and change anything from 10p to £100 for it, they don't, thus to any sensible person it is free.
By comparison Nvidia both charge a licensing fee AND require the g-sync module both of which have a significant cost, both costs which do not exist in regards to Freesync.
There is also nothing electrically different about the display port 1.2a over 1.2 afaik, it's just an agreement to effectively use the signal on a spare channel that was left spare for future things like this to be used.
The simple fact is that if freesync did not exist, lets take the Acer freesync screen, without freesync it would still have a DP port, which is identical, and it would still need a couple of chips and some power circuitry and Acer would still be a member of Vesa and still pay the exact same amount for the usage of a DP port. Thus there are no
extra costs there, that freesync uses a DP port which necessitates a Vesa membership is completely irrelevant when those costs are identical to screens not using freesync but use DP(which most even half decent screens do now).
