The observation stated in this 'paradox' isn't even true, and if it were true it wouldn't be a paradox.<p>First, it's not even remotely factually true:<p>- It's easier and easier to use computers while avoiding more and more 'proprietary' software. 25 years ago you could barely do anything without a paid for operating system, now you would be considered a bit of an idiot if you tried to suggest a major datacenter running anything but Linux. The same goes for office applications etc, there used to be nothing at all, now there are multiple high quality options. The same goes for web browsers, and look at the demise of Flash and IE6-only websites. So for basically every category, the last 25 years has been a story of going from complete dominance of proprietary shrink-wrapped software to one where open source alternatives are almost as good or much better.<p>Secondly, if it became true, it wouldn't be a "a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory."<p>- A lot of or even most of the 'proprietary' software being created has no real value as open source to begin with. Lets say Twitter open sources their mobile client, then what? Are you going to modify it and use your modified version? That is absurd, virtually nobody would do this because of the difficulty of even running your modified version on a platform with trusted computing, but lets say you don't care about that. What is the benefit of doing so? So you can tweak a font or add a button? Twitter is releasing all of the open source they can extract from their codebase that they think people would actually find useful, look at all of it: <a href="https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/projects" rel="nofollow">https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/projects</a> . The fact that the twitter.app for IOS isn't open source is 'meh', there is nothing interesting or hard about that app, and you can find a dozen open source equivalents , some of which are actually better.<p>So the claim is false, and if it is someday true, it's not even surprising, much less a 'paradox'.