Commercial Software

Commercial software is software designed to make profit by other means; for example, by selling copies.

Commercial and free software

Many people mistake commercial and free software; they often get it the wrong way round. Above all, software is considered free from the moment the author grants the rights to modify, distribute and extract profits from the product. Free software may be commercial products as well. Good examples of commercial programs that are classified as free are the GNU ADA compiler or many GNU/Linux based operating systems.

The opposite of free software is proprietary software, which can also be commercial or freeware.

Freeware is the software licensing agreement that does not require any payments to the right holder. Freeware is usually distributed in binary form, without source codes and is regarded as proprietary software. Freeware, unlike shareware, does not involve any fee to the developer. No additional services, such as improved versions, are expected.

Shareware is software with royalty-free (or reimbursable under certain conditions) use.

Proprietary software is software that is the private property of authors or rights holders and does not satisfy the criteria of free software (the availability of open source code is not enough). The owner of proprietary software retains the monopoly on its use, copying and modification, in full or essential moments. Typically, any non-free software, including semi-free software, is called proprietary.

For legal and technical reasons, the software is usually proprietary by default.
Copyright laws operate by default, making non-trivial works proprietary.

A custom program is a separate type of commercial program in which the customer pays for all the development work. Such programs are often deprived of all the advantages of commercial products, since they have a limited budget, but are more adapted to the requirements of the customer than out-of-the-box analogues.