I'm curious-- why don't GPL advocates ever flip the argument back on the proprietary devs? E.g., You are a developer of proprietary software. Your aim is to pr

I'm curious-- why don't GPL advocates ever flip the argument back on the proprietary devs? E.g., You are a developer of proprietary software. Your aim is to provide the same freedoms in practice that users enjoy in GPL'd software. What do you do? There is a sensible and real answer here-- custom software development. If a user is paying a dev/dev-team to build that user some custom software, then barring fraud they have full control over what the software does. Plus, custom software and custom software development probably make up a huge chunk of the dev economy. But notice that this is nearly never what GPL opponents are talking about. (In fact there is surely overlap between GPL'd software and custom software dev.) Instead they talk about consumer applications, games, etc.-- software which does not give its users the same freedoms as GPL'd software. In this class of software, there must then be an implicit premise: either the freedoms that end-users enjoy in both GPL'd software and custom software do not matter, or some other novel argument that downplays both the practical and ethical benefits of those freedoms. And here's the thing-- whatever the implicit argument is, it runs counter to the spirit of both GPL'd software and custom software dev. GPL advocates ought to use this argument to split the opposition between custom software development (regardless of license) on the one hand, and whatever the word is for proprietary software that aims to lock users into a system they can't control on the other. Btw, the fact that I can't think of the word for the second category is a red flag that GPL advocates do a shit job with their propaganda. :) Edit: clarification