Proprietary Software – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation

Proprietary software, also called nonfree software,
means software that doesn’t
respect users’ freedom and
community. A proprietary program puts its developer or owner

in a position of power over its users.
This power is in itself an injustice.

The point of this directory is to show by examples that the initial
injustice of proprietary software often leads to further injustices:
malicious functionalities.

Power corrupts; the proprietary program’s developer is tempted to
design the program to mistreat its users. (Software designed to
function in a way that mistreats the user is called malware.)
Of course, the developer usually does not do this out of malice, but
rather to profit more at the users’ expense. That does not make it
any less nasty or more legitimate.

Yielding to that temptation has become ever more frequent; nowadays
it is standard practice. Modern proprietary software is typically
an opportunity to be tricked, harmed, bullied or swindled.

Online services are not released software, but in regard to all the
bad aspects, using a service is equivalent to using a copy of released
software. In particular, a service can be designed to mistreat the
user, and many services do that. However, we do not list instances of
malicious dis-services here, for two reasons. First, a service
(whether malicious or not) is not a program that one could install a
copy of, and there is no way at all for users to change it. Second,
it is so obvious that a service can mistreat users if the owner wishes
that we hardly need to prove it.

However, most online services require the user to run a nonfree
app. The app is released software, so we do list malicious
functionalities of these apps. Mistreatment by the service itself is
imposed by use of the app, so sometimes we mention those mistreatments
too—but we try to state explicitly what is done by the app and
what is done by the dis-service.

When a web site provides access to a service, it very likely sends
nonfree JavaScript software to execute in the user’s browser. Such
JavaScript code is released software, and it’s morally equivalent to
other nonfree apps. If it does malicious things, we want to mention
them here.

When talking about mobile phones, we do
list one
other malicious characteristic, location tracking which is caused
by the underlying radio system rather than by the specific software in
them.