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When you look at any app store, you’ll find that the many apps that are infested with ads, spyware, malware, and dark patterns are pretty much always proprietary. Conversely, any FOSS app that tries to introduce such garbage would be forked to remove their offending attributes, which makes FOSS apps much higher-quality than proprietary apps in general.

You are using false equivalence by incorrectly implying that proprietary software is commercial while FOSS is not. Both FOSS and proprietary software can be sold and commercialized with various monetization strategies. For example, you are currently using Lemmy, a FOSS social network whose development is funded by donations. Nobody here believes that Reddit is better because it is proprietary adware.

Free and open source software licenses provide users the right to use, modify, and redistribute the software. Proprietary software does not. That difference makes FOSS inherently better for users than proprietary software.

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Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

When you look at any app store, you’ll find that the many apps that are infested with ads, spyware, malware, and dark patterns are pretty much always proprietary

Right, because FOSS software never has any of that…

which makes FOSS much higher-quality than proprietary software in general.

That’s not how that works. There’s plenty of paid software that doesn’t have any of those things.

Both FOSS and proprietary software can be sold and commercialized with various monetization strategies.

You’re just arguing pointless semantics now.

Nobody here believes that Reddit is better on the basis that it is proprietary adware instead of FOSS.

You’re cherry-picking.

That difference makes FOSS inherently better for users than proprietary software.

No. It absolutely does not. Why do I care if you can “use, modify and redistribute” trash software?

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- airglow@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  FOSS adware and spyware apps are rare because it’s trivial to fork it and remove the undesirable elements. Users have every incentive to use the ad-free and spyware-free forks, which eventually causes the superior user-friendly forks to overtake the originals. However, proprietary adware and spyware apps cannot be forked in the same way, preventing users from stripping out the ads and tracking. The ability to use, modify, and redistribute “trash software” allows anyone to transform FOSS with undesirable elements into excellent software by removing such elements, whereas proprietary “trash software” remains trashy.
  
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