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I'm a big fan of open source, but why is it obvious that "proprietary is bad for society", exactly? I'd venture to guess that most of the people that frequent t

I'm a big fan of open source, but why is it obvious that "proprietary is bad for society", exactly? I'd venture to guess that most of the people that frequent this site work for companies that sell proprietary software in some form or another. People being employed is pretty beneficial to society.

tastythrowaway 7y ago
My guess would be that the long tail of proprietary (due to existing market, mergers, de-facto standards, etc.) favors a greedy incumbent, which has basically never in history worked in the favor of the many. But published, open standards allow for greater adoption and participation, as well as a longer support lifespan.
ahnick 7y ago
The FSF provides a fairly long (strongly worded?) list of reasons on this page. https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html IMHO proprietary software is better than no software, but open source software is better than proprietary software in terms of societal benefit. My favorite open source business model is the "Free Software Product" model. (Best articulated here -> https://sfosc.org/docs/book/business-models/#free-software-product https://sfosc.org/docs/book/business-models/#free-software-p...) The core ideas are: 1. Free software products have trademarked, proprietary distributions, with commercial terms attached. 2. Free software products (may) have 100% open source distributions, but they must use different trademarks and naming conventions, and receive no direct customer support or interaction from the upstream. They are strictly downstream repackaging of the proprietary upstream distribution. This is true regardless of which source code repository is being committed to - the user relationship is defined in terms of the commercial product, not the free software project. By either using this model on its own or combining it with OpenSaaS, I think it is entirely possible to run a profitable business, while providing public access to the code that benefits society.

tastythrowaway 7y ago

My guess would be that the long tail of proprietary (due to existing market, mergers, de-facto standards, etc.) favors a greedy incumbent, which has basically never in history worked in the favor of the many. But published, open standards allow for greater adoption and participation, as well as a longer support lifespan.

ahnick 7y ago

The FSF provides a fairly long (strongly worded?) list of reasons on this page. https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html IMHO proprietary software is better than no software, but open source software is better than proprietary software in terms of societal benefit. My favorite open source business model is the "Free Software Product" model. (Best articulated here -> https://sfosc.org/docs/book/business-models/#free-software-product https://sfosc.org/docs/book/business-models/#free-software-p...) The core ideas are: 1. Free software products have trademarked, proprietary distributions, with commercial terms attached. 2. Free software products (may) have 100% open source distributions, but they must use different trademarks and naming conventions, and receive no direct customer support or interaction from the upstream. They are strictly downstream repackaging of the proprietary upstream distribution. This is true regardless of which source code repository is being committed to - the user relationship is defined in terms of the commercial product, not the free software project. By either using this model on its own or combining it with OpenSaaS, I think it is entirely possible to run a profitable business, while providing public access to the code that benefits society.