Proprietary packages: Proprietary = made and marketed by a firm having the exclusive right to manufacture and distribute. In the context of software vendors, a proprietary package is owned solely by the firm, and the firm, through a licensing agreement, sells the rights to buyers to USE their packages. For example: Microsoft owns "MS Word", "WindowsNT", "Excel" etc IBM (who now owns Lotus) owns "Lotus 123" etc. again, a virtually endless list