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Software Freedom, a Japanese Perspective - Part III: Proprietary Software Suboptimal
Working upstream still better
In Part I and Part II we got a "taste" of the sorts of issues that hold back GNU/Linux adoption in Japan. A local (Japan) explained to us that he had already covered the reasons. He wrote: "An engineer with insufficient freedom tasked with solving a problem runs the risk of implementing a solution which is not ideal: it may turn out to be ineffective, costly, hazardous or all three at once." ("The four freedoms and GNU/Linux naming controversy")
"The solution," he told us, "may be far from ideal but it may be profitable for say, some subcontractor. The product may have shortcomings which surface whenever changes are made, even to places which ostentatiously appear unrelated. This leads to time-and-money-consuming testing and modifications but this may be profitable for some company."
This is what proprietary software is like; contrariwise, Free software does not have such artificial limitations. There is more reuse, there are more contributors, and costs are spread out. █
Image source: Sushi