Drawbacks of Proprietary Software

Proprietary software belongs to a person or company, and its source code is kept private. That control brings drawbacks both for the people who use the software and for the company that makes it.

It usually costs money. You normally pay a one-off price or a regular subscription, and a subscription keeps taking money every month whether or not you use the software much. A driving instructor who pays monthly for booking software loses access to her pupils' appointments if she cancels, even though she has paid for years. Paying buys permission to use the software, not the software itself.

You cannot change it or fix it yourself. Without the source code you cannot add a feature your organisation needs or repair a bug. A youth club that wants its membership program to print badge labels has to ask the developer, wait for a reply and possibly pay for the change. Until the developer acts, the problem stays.

You depend on the developer. If the company stops updating the software, goes out of business or drops the product, bugs stay unfixed and the software may stop working with newer operating systems. You cannot take over its maintenance yourself.

The licence restricts use. A licence may limit what the software can be used for, how many people can use it or where it can be installed. A theatre group that buys a new backstage laptop may need permission to move its ticketing software across, and may have to pay again. It cannot simply treat one paid copy as something it can install wherever it likes.

The developer pays for everything. The company must fund all development, testing and customer support itself, before any sales come in. If the software sells poorly, those costs are lost, and paying support staff and writing regular updates are expensive.

These are not the drawbacks of open source software, where the usual problem is support coming only from community forums.