PwerMake

Rethinking Proprietary Technology in an Age of Digital Sovereignty

Digital sovereignty is not a slogan, but a fundamental right and a practical necessity for human progress. The presence of digital sovereignty in a society signifies the autonomy of individuals, organizations, and entire nations to determine their own digital destinies, to decide how their data is stored, how their systems operate, and how their technologies evolve. It is about agency, independence, and the assurance that one's digital environment is not being shaped, restricted, or monetized by unseen hands.

In this article, I will present the simple but uncompromising argument that true digital sovereignty is only possible within an open-source ecosystem. Everything else, regardless of its polish, efficiency, or market dominance, inevitably demands surrender from its participants. Not only of access and insight, but of basic self-control. Proprietary technology, by its very design, denies autonomy in the consumer. It does this not by overt coercion, but through opacity, licensing traps, and a culture of dependency disguised as convenience.

Yet this dependency is not inevitable. Around the world, capable engineers, designers, and thinkers have demonstrated for hundreds of years since the Renaissance that technology does not need to be proprietary to be powerful, elegant, or secure. The main obstacle has never been technical feasibility. Instead, it has been lack of social and economic will. At the present time, we, as a civilization, might seem to have chosen convenience and branding over empowerment, and profit pipelines over genuine public investment in the creation of shared, open alternatives. However, if we make a deliberate commitment to support and fund the people building open systems, the current proprietary order will quickly show itself not as the pinnacle of progress it is advertised to be, but as the outdated and ineffective relic it has already become.

The Illusion of Control in Proprietary Systems

Proprietary systems trade on the illusion of empowerment. When working with proprietary cloud software, for example, there is no notion that you have any ownership stake in the system, including for whatever content that you create and maintain yourself. Even when working with offline desktop software, the only right you possess to it is a license to use it under very specific conditions, and only under terms that can be changed without notice. This conditioning comes as a consequence of conscious design behaviors on the system that make it impossible for you to produce or maintain the same files on any other system. These techniques are collectively known as vendor lock-in, where your workflows, data, and infrastructure become so entangled with the vendor's ecosystem that escape is impractical, if not impossible. Pricing can shift, essential features can vanish, and what was once expected to be included as basic functions become costly upgrades. On this path, every dependency deepens your captivity.

The opacity of these systems compounds the issue. Proprietary technology is, by its own preference, a black box to the consumer; inaccessible, unclear, and shielded by dubious legal barriers. Users must accept on faith what the system claims to do. Whether it mishandles data, introduces vulnerabilities, or manipulates outcomes, you cannot know, because you aren't permitted to look.

Even when it comes to your own data, ownership is ambiguous and conditional. Exporting or migrating it is often obstructed by obscure formats, incompatible schemas, or outright policy restrictions. The more data you entrust to a proprietary platform, the more power you relinquish to it. Your digital identity becomes a hostage to someone else's profit model.

Privacy and Security: Trust Without Transparency Is a Myth

Security can't exist without transparency. The myth of security through obscurity, or the belief that secrecy itself is protection, has long been discredited. In proprietary systems, only the vendor can audit, patch, or even acknowledge security flaws. The result is a fragile ecosystem in which users are both blind and defenseless. They must depend entirely on the vendor's timing, competence, and honesty; all virtues which have come into question over the past several decades.

Time and again, closed-source products have also been caught in public scandals, collecting excessive user data, embedding telemetry without consent, or concealing surveillance mechanisms. These aren't accidents but profit incentives. When profit derives from user data, proprietary secrecy becomes a feature, not a flaw.

Open-source systems, by contrast, embody the principle that trust must be verifiable. Anyone can inspect the plans and logic, reproduce the build, and confirm that the system does only what it claims. Vulnerabilities, when discovered, are not buried under nondisclosure agreements, but are fixed in the open, often within hours or days. Security becomes a shared responsibility, and therefore a shared strength.

Deployment and Operational Limitations

In the proprietary world, even deployment becomes a mechanism of control. Logic that once ran freely on local devices now demands the vendor's cloud. Licensing terms quietly forbid self-hosting or restrict which geographical locations in the world the system may operate. It's only superficially coincidental that in many cases, the system is not allowed to operate in jurisdictions where fairness and transparency are mandated upon technological systems. This regional or platform confinement is often disguised to the public as compliance or optimization, but its real purpose is to enforce dependency and subscription loyalty wherever it is allowed to feed its relentless greed.

Customization, too, is sacrificed. Proprietary applications rarely adapt to unique organizational workflows. Instead, users must unconditionally adapt themselves to the software's limitations. Integrations are restricted, and automation is discouraged unless it routes through the vendor's own ecosystem. What should have always been a generic, friendly tool has become a ubiquitous gatekeeper, dictating how work is done rather than enabling it in whatever form it should happen to take.

Open source, on the other hand, reverses this dynamic. You decide where to deploy, how to scale, and which tools to integrate. There are no hidden contracts, no artificial ceilings. You are free to tailor every parameter, whether infrastructure, interface, or performance, to your actual needs.

Profit-First Practices Breed Corruption

When profit is the sole governing metric of any venture, integrity inevitably becomes negotiable. In proprietary development, decisions about features, security updates, and even accessibility are guided by revenue potential over user need. The result is a distortion of priorities where essential fixes are delayed until they can be monetized, and convenience is optimized for recurring payments rather than for genuine improvement or fulfillment of a specific end-use.

Dark patterns, or the deceptive design choices that manipulate users into unwanted actions, have become routine in proprietary systems. Interfaces are engineered to extract more data, push upgrades, or discourage cancellation. In that context, users are treated more like moving targets than like valuable customers of the technology.

Open-source communities, by contrast, operate from a completely different incentive structure. Their primary currency is trust and utility, not profit. Contributions are driven by shared purpose, transparency, and the pursuit of collective benefit. When money is involved, it supports the work being done to achieve the overarching goal of productivity, while not necessarily dictating its direction.

Artificial Constraints on Quality and Scalability

In proprietary ecosystems, artificial scarcity is policy. Performance tiers, storage limits, and feature locks are deliberately engineered to create dependency and extract payment. Even when a system could deliver full functionality, it is segmented to ensure that the so-called premium version of a product always costs more. Progress becomes a privilege of budget as opposed to one of innovation.

Open-source technology imposes only natural constraints, like those of current known limitations and human creativity, for example. It scales as far as its users and developers can take it. You are free to optimize, extend, or even fork it entirely. Improvement is not gated, but invited, and independent contributions are often celebrated.

The Erosion of Support and Responsiveness

There was a time when proprietary vendors prided themselves on support, giving the public direct access to trained engineers who knew the system inside and out. Over the years, this promise gradually evaporated. Support was outsourced to foreign countries, where low-paid workers reading prepared scripts replaced on-the-mark expertise, then eventually, the human connection disappeared entirely. Today, customer support offered by a proprietary technology vendor is likely to be a completely automated maze designed more to deflect than it is to assist.

In the open-source world, however, support has evolved into something much more authentic. Communities respond instead of corporations. Developers and users collaborate in real time across public channels. Answers emerge from shared experience, unrelated to any sales incentives, and the result is a culture of collective problem-solving that is faster, more transparent, and far more humane than the sterile support structures of proprietary systems.

Trade Secrets in a World of Open Knowledge

In an era whose very basis was defined by information sharing, secrecy is not a sign of sophistication, but a red flag for trustworthiness. While proprietary technology's reliance on closed processes, guarded APIs, and hidden algorithms feels increasingly archaic, it continues to perpetuate the illusion that knowledge must be hoarded to be valuable, which flies directly in the face of how humans actually reached the realization of modern technology in the 20th century after literally hundreds of years of the world-wide sharing of evolving processes, techniques, and the general discovery of new facts.

Open source, conversely, aligns perfectly with the long-accepted principles of transparency, accountability, and collaboration. It recognizes that innovation flourishes when knowledge is shared among everyone. In a world striving for digital sovereignty, openness is not just an ethical preference; it is a structural requirement. Without it, the balance of power always tilts away from those who use technology and toward those who conceal it for the sole purpose of exploiting humanity rather than helping it.

Conclusion: The Open Source Imperative

Digital sovereignty and proprietary technology cannot coexist. One demands independence while the other enforces unconditional dependence. One invites scrutiny and the other forbids it. One belongs to the people who use it but the other is considered to be the sole intellectual property of the entities that sell it.

Reclaiming sovereignty requires deliberate action:

• Individuals must choose open tools, even when the proprietary alternative seems easier. The catch is often that the easiest trap to walk into is the most difficult to escape.
• Organizations must invest in open infrastructure, funding the systems and the independent professionals within that ecosystem which help to ensure their own long-term freedom.
• Governments must weave the expectation of profound transparency and interoperability into the fabric of civilization, treating open-source technology as an imperative to the success and future of a country and its people.

In the end, digital sovereignty begins where visibility begins, with information you can see, learn, shape, and share. Only then can the digital world reflect not the will of the few, but the collective autonomy of the entire public who depend upon its functionality.