Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-kth--dd1411-Now, the software owners don't/en

Now, the software owners don't really care whether people can change the program or not, but it's useful for their ends to prevent people. Generally when software is proprietary you can't get the sources, you can't change it, and this causes a lot of wasted work by programmers, as well as a lot of frustration by users. For example: I had a friend who told me how she worked for many months at a bank where she was a programmer, writing a new program. Now, there was a commercially available program that was almost right, but it was just not quite the thing they needed, and in fact as it was it was useless for them. The amount of change it would have taken to make it do what they needed was probably small, but because the sources of that program were not available, that was impossible. She had to start over from scratch and waste a lot of work. And we can only speculate about what fraction of all the programmers in the world are wasting their time in this fashion.