Software hoarding

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Software hoarding is a pejorative term for the act of keeping software proprietary. This can cause interoperability problems and can lead to vendor lock-in, and can restrict the free sharing of knowledge. The practice is legal in most countries unless restricted by copyright or license. Proponents of free software consider the practice immoral, and it was the impetus for the creation of "copyleft" licenses.

The term was coined by Richard Stallman in 1984 as a derisive critique of Symbolics, Inc., a company he actively opposed. While employed at MIT, Stallman had worked on a Lisp interpreter as part of the Lisp machine project. An agreement between MIT and Symbolics allowed Symbolics to use the code, and required the company to let the university review changes to it, but did not give the university rights to the changes themselves.