And boy, were they awfully buggy. And you didn't have access to the source to understand why it didn't work, and good luck getting any meaningful support.
Proprietary software really is hell. How that taught us to love the GPL.
Also all the tools you mentioned were incredibly productive and with way better documented than any equivalent open source solution today - assuming there is an equivalent open source solution (especially for something like dbase where the best you can find is somewhere between the awful joke that is LibreOffice Base and the plain awfulness of Harbour).
Honestly you used the worst examples you could come up with if you wanted to paint a "proprietary software bad, open source software good" image. Those were excellent tools (yes, including Visual Basic, which like any user friendly tool with a very low barrier to entry was abused to hell and beyond, thus - again like any user friendly low barrier tool - got a bad name for itself).
Delphi and VB and VC++ and the C Compiler suites for Solaris, AIX and IRIX were mostly fine by themselves, but cost money. Particularly the latter.
Nowadays you see people closing the nagbox in SublimeText to save 10 bucks (or whatever amount this is); back then nothing was free (as beer) and even less free (as speech).
The main thing that modern open source tools do better is the performance of the produced executable by modern compilers is better. But everything else, especially when you go into UI and UX, is much much worse (and most programmers increasingly treating their computers' UIs like terminals from the 70s doesn't help).
I'll agree that the majority of developers today do not want to pay for their tools, but of course with the proliferation of free (as in beer) tools it is expected that the value that people see in their tools (especially when they are surrounded by free tools, like programmers are) will drop dramatically.
I get that it's exaggerated for effect, but that's 1 in a billion....
Yet they hide behind a preacher who never stepped into the misery mill himself. You are on the soap box against borders while we mortals must play papers please.
Feel like earning money? Then pay back some of the dues, so that upstream can stay in business.
That preacher is the reason many anti-GPL folks can enjoy Linux, GCC and a comfortable POSIX like userland.
I wonder why they aren't all making FreeBSD a huge commercial success if GPL is so evil then.
You won't often see GPL software in shipped commercial products, because when you ship stuff you might need to include proprietary components you don't want to have to open up. It still does happen from time to time though.
(as a somewhat related stunning bottoms-up anecdote, a young-ish AIX sysadmin at my recent engagement absolutely positively refused to install AIX tools [1] on the servers, as he didn't want to pollute them with that "unsupported open source stuff")
[1] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/aix-toolbox/i...
There's the rub.
That is quite the inversion. Let’s take an example: search. Elastic has gone public while employing an army of Elasticsearch and Lucene committers, and while selling SaaS and cloud services around Elasticsearch and related projects, thus paying for those committers, creating a massive ecosystem/community, and revenue for themselves (plus return for their investors). A win like that would have been unimaginable in the pre-OSI era. Companies wouldn’t adopt Elasticsearch, wouldn’t put real data in it, and certainly wouldn’t pay some company to run it for them.
Instead, that era saw companies like Verity, FAST, Autonomy, and similar proprietary search engines. Can you even name a proprietary on-premise deployable search engine today? Even if you can, it’s probably powered by Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch under the hood. That’s how much the entire universe has shifted.