Proprietary software is alien: a distant consumer product made by uncaring individuals in distant places. It is like a pen or a stack of paper. It has no character and no community, no ethics and no culture. Proprietary software is a stranger that lives in your house, ticking away with its advertising and its superficial bells and whistles. Vast marketing operations examine “users” with complex statistics and sophisticated A/B testing techniques in an attempt to sell more copies, but really not caring who the “users” are, or whether the product really made their lives better.

Open source is community. The line between producer and consumer is blurred. We talk to the developers, we befriend the developers and sometimes we become developers ourselves. When we find a bug, we are not shuttled through a maze feedback forms and clueless customer support representatives; we directly contact a developer, and we find a solution together after discussing the issue. The software has now become not “theirs” but rather “ours”; we all maintain it and own it together. If the original developers have made a bad decision and alienated their community, the community can fork the project and replace them with different developers. Even if the original developer gives up, the fire continues to burn as another developer steps up to fill the position. As long as enough people care about the software, it can not die.

Open source is always loyal to the user. Loyal? Dr. Richard M. Stallman, the man who pioneered open source, explains it like this:

We say that running free software on your computer means that its operation is under your control. Implicitly this presupposes that your computer will do what your programs tell it to do, and no more. In other words, that your computer will be loyal to you. In 1990 we took that for granted; nowadays, many computers are designed to be disloyal to their users. It has become necessary to spell out what it means for your computer to be a loyal platform that obeys your decisions, which you express by telling it to run certain programs.

Government and corporate backdoors are becoming increasingly commonplace. Open source is our refuge; since the code is available for all to view, any backdoor can be found and brought to light immediately.

Open source can thus be fully trusted. With it, no longer must you look at your PC with an eye of suspicion, thinking about all the kinds of backdoors it might be hiding. No longer must you be at odds with your PC when it attempts to advertise or share data about you. With open source, your PC works for none but you, a trusted servant that is always ready to help, and a community that will support you and advise you no matter what you want to do with your computer.