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Source code should be free to study by all...

One would think that in time, software companies keep trying to keep people from at least freely studying the source code of their products.

The benefits from this far outweigh any concern, and most of the benefits would be for the users themselves. Users would get better software with less cost and development time, than with the current model. Not only that, users would have the opportunity to implement code that better suits their needs if there is a need of doing so.

Locking the source code doesn't lock the code itself, it also locks the user options to have the best software the user could possibly have. Since there is no way to know how the source code functions, there is no way for the user to know if there is a way to make the software a better suit for what the user needs the software for.

Not only that, there is no way to check if the software does what the vendor says it does and nothing more. The user has to blindly trust that there is no malicious code, or code that bridges the privacy of the data the users feeds the software.

Software companies have the right to set limits on how third parties use their source code, but third parties have the right to at least freely study the source code.

What should be encrypted and out of reach of third parties, is the private data that any feed into any piece of software.

Yet, it has come a bad habit to close the source code of the software we use to work on. This limits greatly the way we can actually work, since it make us more and more dependent on the vendor that originally sold us the software the first time.

Open source should be the natural state of the software ecosystem, sadly we couldn't be any more distant of this goal.

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