>whether or not software is proprietary.

I think this has made a huge difference, not so much if it is open source our not but how much things have become locked down. Before if you made a cool program you could hand it out to your friends on a usb stick and run it. These days you have to pay $100 to apple and go through a long approval process before you get listed on the app store. Its the same with all the platforms people use now. They have become more and more locked down pushing the regular user in to simply consuming content and only the corporations with large dev teams are able to make anything.