Software rights... you have only one
Whether it's software or a bag of Idaho potatoes, the only implied agreement between you and the vendor is that you don't have to buy it.
Software comes with an agreement, terms of use. Software vendors invest money into creating something, and to ensure that they get a return on their investment they have conditions for its use. If those are terms you can agree to, you can buy the software. If not, you don't buy it. All of these peripheral discussions about being able to "fix" it or whatever are irrelevant. If I want to sell software, I'll do my best to accommodate the end user and meet his or her needs, but at some point I'll make some level of compromise to ensure that my neighbor can't duplicate what I did and cut into my revenue. I've got a mortgage and cats to feed.
Clearly a lot of people don't agree with that, and that's why we have things like Linux out there. I'm cool with that. I say it's great that the market can accommodate that. However, if the rest of the world really wanted or needed that, then we'd all be code monkeys and we wouldn't buy software.
Let's get something straight here... I work with Microsoft products. Not only will I admit that, I'll proudly declare it, and I even wrote a book about ASP.NET. That said, in my entire career, technology has never been the reason for any business failure I've encountered. Not even once, and I've been laid-off more times than I care to mention. People tank businesses and fail. Rarely is software, or any technology, the stumbling block. If you really want to look at business risk, look at the people.