...but not in the capacity it is now.

(In case you don't understand what I'm going to be talking about, the FSF and GNU Foundation has a handful of (albeit biased) articles on this subject)

Also I'm not fact checking any of this, I'm kind of just rambling and it's late so yeah.

Proprietary software is anything that does not follow the four essential freedoms as according to the GNU foundation. These include the ability to view the source code, modify it, run it, and/or share it freely; or as GNU put it, "free as in freedom, not free as in beer."

However, there's another problem present in the realm of software: money. If the GNU's "perfect" system were to be put in place, software companies will have to depend on donations to keep them alive.

Although for some companies, such as Canonical, this works fine. However, for a company like Microsoft, this would not work fine. This would mean that they would lack support, putting even more ads in their OS, etc, etc. And with the average Windows user probably not even understanding what free software is, they would likely not think about donating or giving back at all. Whereas in Canonical's situation, the majority of people using Ubuntu do understand that it is free software and what that means, meaning they are more likely able to give back, whether that being via donating, answering questions online, or even contributing to the OS itself.

The GNU foundation has presented a fic to this situation, allowing paid software to be "free," but this presents yet another problem: How would they protect people from just distributing the source, or removing the DRM portion of the code and distributing that?

And, unlike binaries, we're talking about text. Text can be easily shared between people, as it can be represented in a way that is humans understand. Even if there was some sort of DRM on source code, somebody can easily copy paste it into a standard text file.

It's piracy. Piracy is the only reason that allows for this system to be put into place. People can't be trusted, and i can't blame 'em. Some people are poor and can't afford stuff, others don't want to support the developer for whatever reason, others aren't able to get the software in their portion of the world. Those are all completely valid reasons to pirate software.

But there's reasons that DRM is in place for many softwares:

• It encourages people to look for alternatives, increasing competition. If the user doesn't like those alternatives, that increases the chance of paying for the software

• It gives the developers pay

• It's fun to see if you can crack it

But if every application were to instantly become open source, then piracy will become so rampant that it'd actually affect the developers.

Anyway, it's late and I'm tired so Imma end this here, maybe edit it in the morning. Goodnight y'all