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Proprietary software

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Proprietary software refers to a type of software in which the user does not control what it does or cannot study or edit the code and can not distribute the software without permission of the software copyright owner, in contrast to free software, which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed.

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Literal and legal meanings

Exclusive legal rights to software by a proprietor are not required for software to be proprietary, since public domain software and software under a permissive licence can become proprietary software by distributing compiled (binary) versions of the program without making the source code available. Proprietary software includes freeware and shareware.

The free software movement's founder Richard Stallman sometimes uses the term "user-subjugating software" to describe proprietary software, while Eben Moglen sometimes talks of "unfree software". The term "non-free" is often used by Debian developers to describe any software whose licence does not comply with Debian Free Software Guidelines, and they use "proprietary software" specifically for non-free software that provides no source code. The Open Source Initiative prefers the term "closed source software".

Software distributions considered as proprietary may in fact incorporate a "mixed source" model including both free and non-free software in the same distribution.<ref>Template:cite journal</ref> Most if not all so-called proprietary UNIX distributions are mixed source software, bundling open source components like BIND, Sendmail, X Window System, DHCP, and others along with a purely proprietary kernel and system utilities.<ref>Template:cite web </ref><ref>Template:cite web</ref>

For some free software, the same laws used by proprietary software are used to preserve the rights to use, copy and modify the software. This technique is called copyleft.

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Examples

Well known examples of proprietary software include Microsoft Windows, RealPlayer, iTunes, Adobe Photoshop, Mac OS X, WinZip and some versions of Unix.

Some free software packages are also simultaneously available under proprietary terms. Examples include MySQL, Sendmail and ssh. The original copyright holders for a work of free software, even copyleft free software, can use dual-licensing to allow themselves or others to redistribute proprietary versions. Non-copyleft free software (i.e. software distributed under a permissive free software licence or released to the public domain) allows anyone to make proprietary redistributions.

Some proprietary software comes with source code or provides offers to the source code. Users are free to use and even study and modify the software in these cases, but are restricted by either licences or non-disclosure agreements from redistributing modifications or sharing the software. Examples include Pine, the Microsoft Shared source licence program, and certain proprietary implementations of ssh.

Shareware, like freeware, is proprietary software available at zero price, but differs in that it is free only for a trial period, after which some restriction is imposed or it is completely disabled. Proprietary software which is no longer marketed by its owner and is used without permission by users is called abandonware and may include source code. Some abandonware has its source code placed in the public domain either by its author or copyright holder and is therefore free software, not proprietary software.

For certain proprietary software where the user can access source code, such as online applications (such as Internet forum software) or Java applications (where the source can be obtained by decompiling), some developers will obfuscate the source code in order to make it difficult for users to obtain the original code.

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Proprietary software

From Network Dictionary Wiki

Literal and legal meanings

Examples

See also