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...$100, an amount of money I make in about 2 hours of work. For 4 weeks of mindless drudgery I could at least be getting paid about eight grand.

Hey Richie Rich - if you make so much money, then why is your site down?

http://www.themanpages.net/

Heh - the antispam text is "dildo." It couldn't be more appropriate.

With free software I am a user, the software a tool. My data and programs are my own to do with as I please.

This just isn't true. Your data may be your own, but you still do not own the program or its source code. There's no difference here between proprietary software and free software. The author of the software is the copyright holder on the source code as an incident of authorship, and this has been the law since 1978. Unless that person specifically, in writing, transfers the copyright to the group of people defined as users of their code, it legally belongs to them, not you. It is not your program any more than Windows is.

This might suck, it might not be fair, it might not be right, but it is how copyright works. The contents of this post are copyrighted to me as an incident of authorship the instant that it's saved in Slashdot's database (unless of course Slashdot's Terms of Use include ownership of user-supplied content, etc).

As for your data, you don't own it only because you're using free software. You own it because your typical free software author does not claim ownership of it as part of the terms of use. There is nothing about the nature of free software that makes the data more yours than proprietary software does, it's the spirit of the userbase that brings this about. Quicken is proprietary software and they don't own my banking records.

What free software typically does give you is more control over where your data goes and how it's used. If you want to define that as ownership, then I am strongly inclined to agree with you on that point. I guess I'm arguing nitpicky linguistic semantics here, so biff me in the head and move on.

With proprietary software I must prove myself to not be a criminal before I can use the program

Bullshit. How so? Because you had to agree to a EULA before you could use it? And free software isn't like that? Then what in the hell is this? A warm hug and a milkshake? It's the content of the license that limits you, not the distribution model of the program. Nothing stops free software from having draconian EULA's, and nothing stops proprietary software from having generous and forgiving EULA's.

EULAs generally restrict my ability to use my system in any way I choose, even if I am paying for each and every program on the machine.

Yes! And any EULA can do that, regardless of whether it's penned by a billionaire in Seattle or a freelance programmer spitting out open source code in caffeine-induced dilerium in his mother's basement.

Should one of my employees get pissed at me, he or she can call the BSA and they'll send some nice armed marshals to my door to audit every nook and cranny of my system.

I heartily agree with you here, and it's incredibly difficult to control your users' systems sufficiently to mitigate this risk without locking them down to the point of being unusable.

With free software, if program X doesn't have a functionality I need then I can have it modified.

By who? The community of authors? You can only do this if either you have the time and technical skill to do it, or you can convince a member of the community of the need.

If proprietary program Y doesn't have a functionality that I need, then the only thing I can do is beg and plead for them to add it.

What's the difference? Other than, "I can code it myself if I want", I don't see any. Every business I've worked for has gotten features added to proprietary software that they wanted/needed. I won't pretend it's as cheap, or as easy, but it's possible. My quarrel here is with the way you paint free software as being a m