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Um... as an advocate of free software, I hate to say it, but this article reads kind of funny, in a POV sort of way. Imagine if our article on car looked like this:
Except that it's apples and oranges. When it's some groups of people who call these things this way, rather than the entire relevant population, then those groups should be named. -- Joy [shallot]
The article has improved greatly since the date the comment was originally posted [1] -- 71.161.215.238 14:20, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm with the first poster here. This article is certainly NOT POV. As it is currently written is little more than a mouthpiece for the FSF. If people want a discussion on that, they should read about in appropriate articles. Andacar 19:25, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
Why is it a "pejorative" term? It is a very objective term to me. The word proprietary doesn't mean anything bad. -- Minghong 15:20, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Pejorative is a rather pejorative term itself. Superm401 23:18, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)
That doesn't answer the question. Dragon 280 ( talk) 18:43, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
Stringbean1's edit changes the definition to describe "proprietary software" not in the FSF's sense of non-free software (which is by far the most familiar sense to me) but as a name for what the FSF calls "private software" or "custom software". See Categories of Free and Non-free Software -- Private Software.
One important difference between these two from the FSF's point of view is that the FSF considers proprietary software to be immoral (related to the question of whether the term proprietary is a pejorative term) but considers private software to be legitimate.
If many people use the term "proprietary software" the way Stringbean1's edit does, it might be useful to have two different sections of this article -- "Proprietary software as described by the free and open source software communities" and "Proprietary software as described by (someone else)". -- Schoen 21:25, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
I first wanted to fix the first line, then the first paragraph, but now I see that the whole article needs fixing. Vague talk of "intellectual property", incorrect information about public domain still being proprietary, incorrect implications that Microsoft's Shared Source program puts software in the public domain, "proprietary software" having a defining characteristic that it's usually built to a specfication...
A lot of the information is also irrelevent. This is not a fixable article, it just has to be started again. I will do that now. My rewrite can be reverted of course, and my rewrite will not be perfect, but I hope it will be used to start a-fresh. Gronky 00:00, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
Many old innaccuracies have been brought back, and the article doesn't make much sense in places.
"the commercial version of SSH"? there are loads of commercial versions of SSH, and some are free software and some are proprietary software.
"Many types of software that are offered with zero price are proprietary"? This will be true for any criteria which is completely unrelated. Many types of software that are offered with spell checking functionaliry are also proprietary. And many are free software. Saying that some people confuse freeware with non-proprietary software would be noteworthy, but to say that: say that.
"This is because the source code in those distribution schemes are" ...and the sentence continues by listing a cut down rewording of what was already stated to define proprietary software. Imperfect duplication will lead readers to compare the two definition wordings to see what's special about zero-cost software that gives it a different definition of "proprietary". And a perfect duplication is redundant by definition.
I'll try to clean this again when I get time, but can reasons be given if duplicate and contradictory information is to be re-added? Gronky 17:58, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for you clean-ups, Gronky. I don't think there's any reason to add editorializations of what people get confused. Just state the facts. I think its important to explicitly explain why abandonware, freeware and shareware are proprietary. -- 132.198.104.164 18:55, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Mentioning "software licensing" as a means for implementing restrictions is still confusing though. Software licenses cannot restrict anything. If copyright says "no one can go anywhere", and an owner grants you a license saying "you can come in here but you have to take your shoes off" - the owner has not contributed to the restrictions on you. You can leave your shoes on and stay outside. So, taking everything literally, it's true that software licenses are "involved" in legal means of restricting people - but they're part of the solution, which is something I think most people won't get. So it's misleading.
The following was added to this article:
All permissive free software is available under a single license. Therefore, dual-licensing is hardly a requirement for making "possible" proprietary versions of free software. -- 216.114.171.101 22:37, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
I propose merging the closed source article into this article. I've already mentioned this on Talk:Closed source and the idea got a positive response. The reasons are that the closed source article is quite small, and since it covers basically the same topic as this article, expanding it would basically mean turning it into a duplicate of this article. I'll add the tags now. The discussion should take place in one location, so I propose having the discussion here on this talk page (since the other talk page may end up being merged too). Comments sought. Gronky 10:52, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to know the difference between closed source (= non-free) software and proprietary software. It's hard to get an answer from the free software camp, since the diffence may be irrelevant to them.
The word "proprietary" is based on the word "property"; this indicates that the software rights is partially "owned" by someone, i.e., the license restricts everyone except the copyright holder from something important. Based on this interpretation of the word "proprietary", I have two guesses of licenses that may be exceptions to the proposed equality "closed source=proprietary".
I haven't found any information on whether my guesses are correct; I would appreciate if anyone who knows about this could clarify things for me. -- Erik 19:48, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
The compression done in WinZip is code from the Info-ZIP free software package. Shouldn't it be removed as an example of proprietary software?
Info-ZIP is released under a permissive free software license called the BSD license. The license allows software hoarding, making proprietary derivatives of the free software code. A proprietary derivative, like WinZip, composed in part of free software code and distributed entirely under proprietary terms is therefore wholly proprietary.
The title "Proprietary" gives a somewhat false definition for the intent of this article. Free and Open Source software has been written in proprietary fashions where payment is required to receive the software from the central source, but it still remains FOSS. Then again, this nitpick only applies if the word "proprietary" is synonymous or confuseable with "commercial". In fact, I'd suggest just a clarification somewhere regarding this if there isn't already one hidden.
If the article were titled Non-Free Software (as the FSF suggests), that might introduce unwanted bias towards FOSS, so I would assume that it isn't a viable alternative. The same could be said if the article on DRM was moved to Digital Restrictions Management as that is only the suggested meaning and not the acronym's "official" meaning. -- Unsigned.
Since proprietary software exists, there must be some benefits. Since some is even bought for money, there must also be benefits for users, not only for owners. The article could try to provide some insight on this. Can the first sentence be something along "Proprietary software is software that has a well-defined owner who values that ownership to the software" and further downstream proceed to clarify the difference between owner and committer.
Proprietory and for-pay is distinct concepts. And free software is not a adjective-noun pair either, right? Huh? The term "proprietary software" is created from a noun and a qualifying adjective, now we want to make sure we give the correct meaning for the term to readers who are looking it up in the encylopedia because it is new to them. If we are sure the readers only want to reconfirm a bias, the current article is just fine.
Proprietary software is software that has a well-defined owner, where the owner places emphasis on this ownership for some reason. A frequent case is a commercial software manufacturer who limits use to those who pay for the software in order to finance continued sustained development. To keep the source code of software confidential is a simple way to protect the long-term vision of a development effort and to avoid user confusion over too many variants.
I believe part of the POV issue was related to the choice of headings. The headings were "Risks" and "Advantages". Neither were truly descriptive, and also divided the article into a "for" and "against" paradigm.
If there are POV issues, let them be heard. If there are more so-called "Pro" arguments, to be added along with Microsoft's, let them also be contributed. The closed source software article may be considered NPOV, but it doesn't delve in to the issues taken up in this article to the same degree, and also it has no references. This article does. -- 75.69.87.211 14:38, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 |
Um... as an advocate of free software, I hate to say it, but this article reads kind of funny, in a POV sort of way. Imagine if our article on car looked like this:
Except that it's apples and oranges. When it's some groups of people who call these things this way, rather than the entire relevant population, then those groups should be named. -- Joy [shallot]
The article has improved greatly since the date the comment was originally posted [1] -- 71.161.215.238 14:20, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm with the first poster here. This article is certainly NOT POV. As it is currently written is little more than a mouthpiece for the FSF. If people want a discussion on that, they should read about in appropriate articles. Andacar 19:25, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
Why is it a "pejorative" term? It is a very objective term to me. The word proprietary doesn't mean anything bad. -- Minghong 15:20, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Pejorative is a rather pejorative term itself. Superm401 23:18, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)
That doesn't answer the question. Dragon 280 ( talk) 18:43, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
Stringbean1's edit changes the definition to describe "proprietary software" not in the FSF's sense of non-free software (which is by far the most familiar sense to me) but as a name for what the FSF calls "private software" or "custom software". See Categories of Free and Non-free Software -- Private Software.
One important difference between these two from the FSF's point of view is that the FSF considers proprietary software to be immoral (related to the question of whether the term proprietary is a pejorative term) but considers private software to be legitimate.
If many people use the term "proprietary software" the way Stringbean1's edit does, it might be useful to have two different sections of this article -- "Proprietary software as described by the free and open source software communities" and "Proprietary software as described by (someone else)". -- Schoen 21:25, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
I first wanted to fix the first line, then the first paragraph, but now I see that the whole article needs fixing. Vague talk of "intellectual property", incorrect information about public domain still being proprietary, incorrect implications that Microsoft's Shared Source program puts software in the public domain, "proprietary software" having a defining characteristic that it's usually built to a specfication...
A lot of the information is also irrelevent. This is not a fixable article, it just has to be started again. I will do that now. My rewrite can be reverted of course, and my rewrite will not be perfect, but I hope it will be used to start a-fresh. Gronky 00:00, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
Many old innaccuracies have been brought back, and the article doesn't make much sense in places.
"the commercial version of SSH"? there are loads of commercial versions of SSH, and some are free software and some are proprietary software.
"Many types of software that are offered with zero price are proprietary"? This will be true for any criteria which is completely unrelated. Many types of software that are offered with spell checking functionaliry are also proprietary. And many are free software. Saying that some people confuse freeware with non-proprietary software would be noteworthy, but to say that: say that.
"This is because the source code in those distribution schemes are" ...and the sentence continues by listing a cut down rewording of what was already stated to define proprietary software. Imperfect duplication will lead readers to compare the two definition wordings to see what's special about zero-cost software that gives it a different definition of "proprietary". And a perfect duplication is redundant by definition.
I'll try to clean this again when I get time, but can reasons be given if duplicate and contradictory information is to be re-added? Gronky 17:58, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for you clean-ups, Gronky. I don't think there's any reason to add editorializations of what people get confused. Just state the facts. I think its important to explicitly explain why abandonware, freeware and shareware are proprietary. -- 132.198.104.164 18:55, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Mentioning "software licensing" as a means for implementing restrictions is still confusing though. Software licenses cannot restrict anything. If copyright says "no one can go anywhere", and an owner grants you a license saying "you can come in here but you have to take your shoes off" - the owner has not contributed to the restrictions on you. You can leave your shoes on and stay outside. So, taking everything literally, it's true that software licenses are "involved" in legal means of restricting people - but they're part of the solution, which is something I think most people won't get. So it's misleading.
The following was added to this article:
All permissive free software is available under a single license. Therefore, dual-licensing is hardly a requirement for making "possible" proprietary versions of free software. -- 216.114.171.101 22:37, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
I propose merging the closed source article into this article. I've already mentioned this on Talk:Closed source and the idea got a positive response. The reasons are that the closed source article is quite small, and since it covers basically the same topic as this article, expanding it would basically mean turning it into a duplicate of this article. I'll add the tags now. The discussion should take place in one location, so I propose having the discussion here on this talk page (since the other talk page may end up being merged too). Comments sought. Gronky 10:52, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to know the difference between closed source (= non-free) software and proprietary software. It's hard to get an answer from the free software camp, since the diffence may be irrelevant to them.
The word "proprietary" is based on the word "property"; this indicates that the software rights is partially "owned" by someone, i.e., the license restricts everyone except the copyright holder from something important. Based on this interpretation of the word "proprietary", I have two guesses of licenses that may be exceptions to the proposed equality "closed source=proprietary".
I haven't found any information on whether my guesses are correct; I would appreciate if anyone who knows about this could clarify things for me. -- Erik 19:48, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
The compression done in WinZip is code from the Info-ZIP free software package. Shouldn't it be removed as an example of proprietary software?
Info-ZIP is released under a permissive free software license called the BSD license. The license allows software hoarding, making proprietary derivatives of the free software code. A proprietary derivative, like WinZip, composed in part of free software code and distributed entirely under proprietary terms is therefore wholly proprietary.
The title "Proprietary" gives a somewhat false definition for the intent of this article. Free and Open Source software has been written in proprietary fashions where payment is required to receive the software from the central source, but it still remains FOSS. Then again, this nitpick only applies if the word "proprietary" is synonymous or confuseable with "commercial". In fact, I'd suggest just a clarification somewhere regarding this if there isn't already one hidden.
If the article were titled Non-Free Software (as the FSF suggests), that might introduce unwanted bias towards FOSS, so I would assume that it isn't a viable alternative. The same could be said if the article on DRM was moved to Digital Restrictions Management as that is only the suggested meaning and not the acronym's "official" meaning. -- Unsigned.
Since proprietary software exists, there must be some benefits. Since some is even bought for money, there must also be benefits for users, not only for owners. The article could try to provide some insight on this. Can the first sentence be something along "Proprietary software is software that has a well-defined owner who values that ownership to the software" and further downstream proceed to clarify the difference between owner and committer.
Proprietory and for-pay is distinct concepts. And free software is not a adjective-noun pair either, right? Huh? The term "proprietary software" is created from a noun and a qualifying adjective, now we want to make sure we give the correct meaning for the term to readers who are looking it up in the encylopedia because it is new to them. If we are sure the readers only want to reconfirm a bias, the current article is just fine.
Proprietary software is software that has a well-defined owner, where the owner places emphasis on this ownership for some reason. A frequent case is a commercial software manufacturer who limits use to those who pay for the software in order to finance continued sustained development. To keep the source code of software confidential is a simple way to protect the long-term vision of a development effort and to avoid user confusion over too many variants.
I believe part of the POV issue was related to the choice of headings. The headings were "Risks" and "Advantages". Neither were truly descriptive, and also divided the article into a "for" and "against" paradigm.
If there are POV issues, let them be heard. If there are more so-called "Pro" arguments, to be added along with Microsoft's, let them also be contributed. The closed source software article may be considered NPOV, but it doesn't delve in to the issues taken up in this article to the same degree, and also it has no references. This article does. -- 75.69.87.211 14:38, 1 March 2007 (UTC)