> The customer can fix bugs and make improvements. Better yet, while they pay, they can foist this off on the seller. What the customer could usually only hope

> The customer can fix bugs and make improvements. Better yet, while they pay, they can foist this off on the seller. What the customer could usually only hope for in the best case with open source—a timely response from a responsible person—they now get by right, under contract. > If the seller drops the product, the customer can fork and maintain under fallback license. Or hire someone else to do it. I don't see how a proprietary license can efficiently ensure these two properties without just being a open source license + service contract. I do agree that OSL + service contract is a useful type of license, but I think almost every other type of proprietary license for software is worse for the consumer. I don't think you can in general "foist" improvements and bug fixes onto the developer; they still have the option to not implement the features you think are best. In fact if they have multiple clients there is a good chance they cannot even acting in good faith fulfill everyone's requests. I haven't seen many contracts of this type, but I would suspect most licenses don't have a fallback license that allows multiple clients to choose to use a new company to maintain the product. This is one of the most important properties of OSL, it is easy to fork while still sharing maintenance costs.