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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

> A proprietary program puts its developer or owner in a position of power over its users. This power is in itself an injustice.

Apart from the horrible style and lack of nuance, it's simply not true. To reply in the same style: who pays for proprietary software, often can demand changes. With OSS, the user is in no position to do so at all.

There is of course nuance here, since large companies with many end users do not listen to their paying customers, and OSS developers can be responsive, but I don't feel particularly kind to someone who uses false and nonsensical premises to make a political point.

> the proprietary program's developer is tempted to design the program to mistreat its users

I mean ...

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> To reply in the same style: who pays for proprietary software, often can demand changes.

Not if it's incompatible with available alternatives (such as Windows), and you're paying for the privilege of merely having security updates.

Have you ever seen a payer demand a change from a proprietary vendor and get it? Whereas, people fork and make distros of free software all of the time.

> Have you ever seen a payer demand a change from a proprietary vendor and get it?

This happens constantly, but in private. Usually the conversation goes like this:

    customer: opens support ticket, asking how to do some task X
    vendor: sorry, that needs a feature added to the product
    customer: fine, we'll switch to $other_vendor
    vendor: oh look at that, our engineering department scheduled the feature for next release.

Granted though that when dealing with vendors as large as Microsoft that's not going to happen.

At least in the cloud space, the conversation is often more like "We would use you, but X and Y features are business-critical and you do not support them."

They're called "table-stakes features."

> who pays for proprietary software, often can demand changes

So how do I demand that Windows 10 stops spying on me?

You can demand that by paying for an enterprise license of Windows and then disabling the tracking yourself: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-w...

Boycott it. If enough users cease to buy the OS, Microsoft suffers economic consequence and may change the design to adapt to customer desires.

This model works less well for free software / open source, which often has a lack of financial incentives to motivate (or demotivate) developers.

> Boycott it. If enough users cease to buy the OS

So I have to convince thousands (for Windows maybe a million) of people that the thing that irritates me should be removed. Nope, that seldom happens. I find better luck in FOSS where there is enough tweaking potential that I can remove the irritating thing I don't like. Maybe FOSS maintainers and developers have no financial incentive to do what I want, but I can always have a local patch to do that.

Absolutely. You (with your training and ability to manipulate software, test, debug, and deploy) can make the change you like (and maintain it in perpetuity if you can't find someone to take on upstream maintenance).

This is not an option most software users have, but it's probably an option for most readers of this forum.

> This is not an option most software users have

Yes, but the good thing is that more and more people are learning how to program so I am hopeful that things will get better :)

> So I have to convince thousands (for Windows maybe a million) of people that the thing that irritates me should be removed.

No, you can alternatively pay money for a different tier of license that lets you turn it off.

You are assuming that such a tier exists (remember, my comment was not specific to telemetry)

> who pays for proprietary software, often can demand changes. With OSS, the user is in no position to do so at all.

What do you mean by that? With OSS, I can demand any change that I want and have any software development shop that I choose implement that change at a competitive price.

Quite on the contrary, paying for proprietary software does not mean any right for changes as such - even when paying for really expensive enterprise support contracts; I recall a case where not only the vendor would not make such a change, but we were prohibited by the contract to make the change ourselves (by patching the compiled code, which we were technically capable to do for that particular change we wanted).

> paying for proprietary software does not mean any right for changes as such

Sure it can. There are enough cases where the rights of proprietary software are transferred to the client, or the contract includes the right to make changes or get changes made.

That's not at the scale of MS, of course, but that's exactly the kind of qualification missing in OP's statement.

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