"What is obvious to me is that some proprietary companies have made obscene profits by preventing fair competition to keep prices artificially high and stop people from switching to lower cost or free alternatives."
Vendor lock-in is not new, and not exclusive to software by any means. It's an ages old tactic, and one that's been considered fair game forever. A corporation out to make profits is foolish to not use it where possible.
You can't ever stop someone from switching to cheaper or free alternatives. You can only make your product so good (if only through legacy support) that the cost of switching is higher than the cost of buying your product. This, again, is neither new nor unfair.
Abusing near-monopolies (which MS did) is unfair, but has nothing to do with proprietary vs. free. It's perfectly possible to have proprietary software without that. It's like the difference between drinking sensibly and drinking and driving.
You may personally think vendor lock-in is a fair tactic but if you bother to do a little research you'll find some significant court decisions opposing that view (including the one against MS).
Still, I'm a little confused that you see no relationship between monopolies and licensing given that MS was convicted of abusing its monopoly to dictate licensing terms to OEMs.
I'm certainly not saying that Microsoft played entirely by the books. They clearly didn't. They went well beyond standard vendor lock-in. Things like lock-in that are considered fair game in a competitive market are not when a monopoly is involved.
I just don't think it's fair to blame proprietary software for Microsoft's sins.
Microsoft is not the only sinner, they are just the most publicized one. The profit made by Microsoft and the others in the Software Top 100 - http://www.softwaretop100.org/list.php?page=1 is probably several times higher than it would be if not for lock-in and other anti-competitive practices. Those unfair profits are effectively a hardware tax which transfer wealth away from the consumers and businesses who would have presumably spent it on their own interests.
Vendor lock-in is not new, and not exclusive to software by any means. It's an ages old tactic, and one that's been considered fair game forever. A corporation out to make profits is foolish to not use it where possible.
You can't ever stop someone from switching to cheaper or free alternatives. You can only make your product so good (if only through legacy support) that the cost of switching is higher than the cost of buying your product. This, again, is neither new nor unfair.
Abusing near-monopolies (which MS did) is unfair, but has nothing to do with proprietary vs. free. It's perfectly possible to have proprietary software without that. It's like the difference between drinking sensibly and drinking and driving.