“Imagine, if you will, a world where all the computer users
have started a revolt against their oppressors, the people who sell
them software. The users meet together in small smoke-filled bars
plotting for a brighter future. They even draw up a declaration of
independence, a “Users’ Bill of Rights”. It might look like
the following:
We, the users, declare ourselves to be free of the tyrannies of
proprietary software. We have, in good faith, been purchasing
proprietary software for years under the expectation that the
publishing companies would, in return, act well on our behalf.
Unfortunately, this has not been the case. We find proprietary
software companies guilty of the following acts:
- You refuse to fix buggy software in a timely manner and even
charge an extra fee for said bug fixes when they are finally made
available. - You make unnecessary changes in your software which cause it to
become incompatible with both other vendor’s software, as well as
with your own previous versions. - Rather than keeping to open-published standards, you have
purposefully obsfucated protocols and other interfaces such that
interoperabilty between products is sacrificed with no benefit to
the user (but higher profits for the seller).”