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Evaluating the Harmful Effects of Closed Source Software
New submitter Drinking Bleach writes "Eric Raymond, coiner of the term 'open source' and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, writes in detail about how to evaluate the effects of running any particular piece of closed source software and details the possible harms of doing so. Ranking limited firmware as the least kind of harm to full operating systems as potentially the greatest harms, he details his reasoning for all of them. Likewise, Richard Stallman, founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation, writes about a much more limited scope, Nonfree DRM'd games on GNU/Linux, in which he takes the firm stance that non-free software is unethical in all cases but concedes that running non-free games on a free operating system is much more desirable than running them on a non-free operating system itself (such as Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X)."
Obviously you understood very little. Although most people cannot code themselves, with free software they're allowed to ask anybody who can to help them. With proprietary software they face a vendor-lock-in with monopoly on changes to the product and usually to support for the product. And free software is not always gratis. Red Hat runs a billion dollars a year business with free software.