Introduction

In this article I try to explain why software should be free, why you should avoid proprietary (“non-free”) software, why your organization should choose Linux rather than Windows or OS X as the operating system on your computers.

I also try to explain why this choice is currently not the mainstream and why you should nevertheless consider it.

Most experts agree that software vendor lock-in is a problem and Free Software a solution. The controversial question is how serious the problem and how realistic the solution is. On this page we explain why we believe that the problem is serious and the solution realistic.

Short answer to the question in the title: Software should be free because the more your everyday life depends on computers, the more it is important to ask who controls these computers: who decides when to upgrade, which features to drop and which to develop, how to implement security controls, how to distribute the costs.

This document focuses on software, but there are even more fundamental reasons why software should be free: because it is a form of published content (see A just salary for authors and distributors) and because proprietary software is a collective sin that cannot lead to a sustainable modern human civilization.

Proprietary software is easier to use

An often-heard argument against free software is “For me as a non-expert, software products like MS Windows, MS Office and Google Maps are easier and cheaper to use than Linux, LibreOffice and OpenStreetMap”.

Yes, proprietary software is easier to use and sometimes cheaper than free software. And as an individual you will of course choose the easiest way, which is the mainstream, the way chosen by your friends.

But as the leader of an organization you are assumed to think further than an individual human. The captain of a ship must not only care whether the engine works optimally, he must also check whether the ship move into the right direction.

Tangible problems of proprietary software

There are a few aspects of software business you might care about even if you are not an IT expert:

As an end user you actually are an important contributor in the software development process. When you have a problem with a software product, then its owners should be thankful that you take the time of explaining them your problem. Every support request increases the value of their product. Despite this, most software developers make you pay for getting support. In a certain way it should be the opposite.

Who decides which features to include or remove in a software product? Who decides which versions they continue to maintain? The owner of course. The owner also decides about the price to pay. Using a software product makes you depend on its owner. The owner has motivation to bind you even further to their product.

“Proprietary software comes with major barriers such as high costs and vendor lock-in, making OSS more appealing as a viable alternative for digital government services.” (Tony Blair Institute, Open-Source Software: Three Considerations for Digital-Government Transformation)

At the world-wide level there is an increasing concentration of power towards a few software giants. National governments are worried. For example the German Federal Government agreed in 2021 that software development should be generally commissioned as open source. The parliament confirmed this in December 2023. Some activists discovered that in 2023 the government continues in an “obscene” way to spend most of their budget for proprietary rather than free software (sources: netzpolitik.org, computerwoche.de).