That is absolute nonsense. The people behind OSI worked long and hard to find a term that could be instead instead of Free Software, which they considered to have unfortunate connotations. This is something some disagree with, but that was their cause regardless. Their due diligence of the term took great trouble to make sure it had not any undocumented previous use.
Of course the words had occasionally been used together, but not as a term. That would have undermined their legal strategy altogether. They then failed to secure the trademarks they wanted, but not because the term had any documented previous use.
You may disagree with the outcome, you may disagree with the OSI altogether, but it is wrong to misrepresent history.
