OPEN SOURCE VS. PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE

Abstract

The tension between open source and proprietary software constitutes one of the defining structural conflicts of the contemporary digital economy — a conflict that is simultaneously technical, economic, political, and philosophical. This article presents a comprehensive comparative and analytical mapping of both paradigms across their technical, economic, organizational, governance, social, and geopolitical dimensions, drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship from information systems research, political economy, organizational theory, science and technology studies, and legal analysis. The analysis traces the historical emergence of proprietary software as a commercial category following IBM's 1969 unbundling decision; the countervailing institutionalization of the free software and open source movements from 1983 onward; and the subsequent decades of competitive and collaborative interaction that have produced the hybrid landscape of the present. Across the technical domains examined — operating systems, databases, programming languages, cloud infrastructure, development tooling, artificial intelligence, and cryptographic security — the article documents a structural asymmetry: open source has achieved categorical dominance at the infrastructure layer of the digital economy, while proprietary models maintain dominance at the interface and service layers where economic and political power is concentrated. Key tensions analyzed include the free rider problem and chronic underinvestment in open source commons; the strategic commoditization logic by which large technology corporations selectively open-source components to erode competitors' proprietary advantages while retaining proprietary control at value-capturing layers; the governance risks of maintainer burnout, corporate capture, and succession failure; the emerging conflicts between regulatory frameworks — including the EU AI Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, and data protection legislation — and the open source ecosystem; and the geopolitical dimensions of digital sovereignty in which the open/proprietary choice has become a matter of national strategic policy. Six paradigmatic case studies — Linux versus Windows Server, Android's open core architecture, HashiCorp's relicensing of Terraform, the Redis and Elasticsearch licensing conflicts with Amazon Web Services, Meta's LLaMA strategy, and Kubernetes' multi-stakeholder governance — are analyzed to ground the theoretical framework in empirically documented outcomes. The article concludes that the productive question is not which model is superior in the abstract, but rather who benefits from each model, under what institutional conditions, and at which layer of the technology stack — a distributional and contextual analysis that reveals the open source versus proprietary debate to be, at its deepest level, a contest over who holds the power to define how the digital world functions.