Why I Absolutely Require Free Software
Proprietary software is a scheme of power over users. When you cannot read the code, you cannot know what it does. The author can put in backdoors. The author can put in malware. It could be a federal honeypot. You have no way to know and no recourse when you find out.
Nonfree software takes away your freedom to control your own computing. The author decides when the product is obsolete. The author decides what features you get. The author decides when to start charging you for something you already depend on. That is not a software license, that is a leash.
Free software means I decide when a product is obsolete. I decide how it is provisioned, launched, updated, and phased out. The lifecycle and feature set are controlled by me. I can modify it to meet my requirements as they arise. I can study it, fix it, and share those fixes with everyone. That is what it means to respect the user.
Obfuscation is not security. It is the concealment of a compromised codebase by a compromised author. Closing the source is morally wrong and reveals the ulterior motives of whoever made that choice. Privacy is impossible without the ability to verify what software actually does.
I contribute to the free software toolchest because computing freedom is how you liberate people from tyranny. Engineers who are not interested in that project are engineers whose motives I do not trust.
tldr; This post started as a comment responding to a (IMO sketchy), closed source Dropbox clone on this community. That post was rightly removed. My reasons for requiring free software, especially in matters of privacy, are worth repeating.
It's not about trusting the source code or binaries to not have malicious additions.
It's about protecting myself and other users from anti features, by modifying or forking the software of the need ever arises. If software ever adds tracking or telemetry, the community can either modify it downstream (i.e. the way many linux distros compiled out audacity's telemetry), or they can directly fork it.
There is no need to worry about vendor lock in to a proprietary ecosystem, because the option to exit is always there.
Oh, 100%. It's less about security and more about lock in.