Proprietary software is a program that is owned by an individual or company that hold exclusive rights to the use and distribution of the program and its code. The GNU project/Free Software Foundation further defines a program as proprietary if it does not provide the user with their four essential freedoms. The use of proprietary software is often restricted by an end user license agreement (EULA) or other similar agreement which is legally binding. These agreements usually put in writing how you may use the software imposing many restrictions including not redistributing the software, modifying or decompiling it along with the threat of legal repercussions for performing an action deemed not allowed. The user of the software will often agree to these terms by downloading the software or pressing an “I agree” or similar button prior to the program installing. Unfortunately however, most users of proprietary software do not read these agreements and have no understanding of the obligations imposed upon them. This is further deemed worrying by existing court rulings in favor of the copyright holder in legal disputes about software agreements.
Using free software is to make a political and ethical decision asserting the right to learn and share what we learn with others. Users of non-free software are denied these freedoms and benefits. If they make a copy of a proprietary program and give it to a friend, if they try to figure out how a program works or if they put more than one copy on computers in their house they could be caught, fined or put in jail. These are things often stated in the agreement you accept when using proprietary software.
The corporations and individuals behind proprietary software have been found to perform various nefarious activities such as spying on users who install their programs, malicious activity such as restricting what you can or cannot install on your device and selling your data to third party companies. This represents an unacceptable risk in our ever-growing digital lives and is a danger to our free society.
Free software is strongly related to the use of open standards, Standards are considered open when they are freely open and created by a not-for-profit organisation on the basis of an open decision making procedure available to all interested parties and reusable without any restrictions. The use of open standards makes your data free of any constraints to a particular program and makes it easy to migrate and exchange your data between applications, computers or operating systems. This is often impossible with many popular existing proprietary program data files.
Provides complete freedom
Originally computer manufactures considered only hardware innovation and did not focus on software never considering it a business asset. This was because most computer users were scientists and technicians who would write and modify their own software and it was distributed freely. Later, higher-level programming languages were introduced that worked across multiple hardware types and allowed programmers to further refine their software to run better on older hardware. This led to a decrease of profit margins for hardware manufacturers, this led to them treating software as a business asset bringing with it proprietary software. Today, free software gives the users the ability to study how the programs they use work and allows them to modify and further improve the program and distribute it help others, the way it was originally intended. This is impossible with proprietary software.
No imposed upgrades
Free software never disappears like proprietary software. If proprietary software vendors cease supporting a program the users generally have two options: continue using the unsupported software or perform the unwanted upgrade. Sometimes the user does not have a choice and an upgrade is forced. Imposed upgrades cannot happen with free software. For example, when RedHat (a producer of a popular GNU/Linux operating system) stopped supporting versions 7, 8 and 9 of their operating system various other companies came forward and supported these systems. This is possible because the source code is available without restriction to its users. A user of free software may choose to keep using an outdated and unsupported version of a program or they may choose to continue development themselves or pay someone else to do it.
No spying or malicious activity, auditable
If a user has no control over the software they are using, it can easily spy on their activities and perform various malicious acts which are sometimes agreed to in the agreement the user signed yet probably did not read and understand. The use of free software provides the user and community to audit the software’s source code in order to detect any malicious spying or activities. Free software is of course not free of malicious code, however through the efforts of many capable users and companies that are paid to audit free software anything malicious is found and removed. This is impossible with proprietary software, you are forced to trust the programs owner. This is also true for bug and security fixes – they cannot be verified in proprietary software, this is dangerous.
No monopolies
Using free software you are free to switch to various different version of free software maintained by various people and companies. Most major pieces of free software have various versions maintained by other companies and users, with free software you are free to switch between then without restriction or difficulty compared to the likes of proprietary software.