I think you overestimate how helpful a paid support option is. I've spent time working with the vendor of closed source software to get issues resolved; it's often incredibly painful and time consuming, and meanwhile the business is not able to realize the full benefit of the software they've paid for. Meanwhile, I have never run into an issue in open source software that I wasn't able to fix on my own (absent help/response from upstream) or at least figure out a workaround, often one that would not be possible to figure out without source access. (Note that I'm explicitly ignoring the kind of "fit for purpose" issues that you're never going to resolve, period, whether it's closed or open.)
Adopting open source is not without its own risks, but it does give you many more options than any closed alternative ever will. If your business does not value that difference, then that's fine, as long as you've made that decision with open eyes.
Meanwhile, the closed source tool doesn't support your desired action action either, but their file format is binary/compressed/encrypted/undocumented for nebulous "business reasons," so you end up spending fifteen hours pushing buttons in their GUI instead.
Speaking from experience: even if a software product is not freely licensed, there is immense value in source code being available and - better yet - modifiable (whether directly or through plugins) when trying to troubleshoot issues with that software or integrate it with other software or adapt it for your business' needs. Further, if your company's finance department is worth its salt, any such customizations and integrations are assets with real value, so even if your company's engineers are "wasting time" tinkering, the company can - and should - still capture this value on the books.
And further speaking from experience: with relatively few exceptions, I've found enterprise software vendors to be pretty much useless in terms of support, and to be more often than not an obstacle to business operations than a value to it when things go wrong. All for a pricetag that doesn't even come close to justifying their meager SLAs (that they'll inevitably weasel their way out of anyway).
The decision to use transparent software is more often than not a decision in the best interests of a company. Transparency is a dependency of trust; without that transparency, you have no real way of knowing whether you can trust your business on it.
One uses low pricing, is likable, and provides a fine list of enterprise features. The HN crowd will realise that these features are really different ways of describing a very small amount of code. But if you want to spend your employer's money and don't care to spoil that by telling your managers too much, the list is fine. Engineers who like the likable make money be spent.
One writes per-customer code on top of largely the same body of code, and charges very high prices, largely because they clearly know how to get stuff done using that code. They have the references to prove it, and they wrote the code, and the customers accept that they invoice customers for improvements to the free base too.
One uses a technique I don't understand at all. It's different from the other three, and it works. I mention it to say that the other three aren't an exhaustive list.
The fourth targets nontechnical customers and sell SaaS, I don't know the price level. You can git-clone the code and selfhost if you want, they'll be friendly but not helpful. If you make a PR on github they'll at least look at it.
I think the open source equivalent is: "What if this library stops being maintained"
Which I have encountered multiple times. Having the source code is useful, but most people don't have the time to add another open source library to the code that they need to maintain.
The freedoms the free software movement tries to realize are not comparable to what you are saying. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
A way of understanding free software, IMO, is that working with software for which freedoms are socially limited (so-called proprietary software) towards someone else, the proprietor, robs the user of the software of freedom and creates some kind of social hierarchy that is undesirable.
Meanwhile, the basic idea of radical leftism is that working using capital for which freedoms are socially limited to the benefit of someone else robs the worker (really, if you think about it, user-of-capital) of freedom and creates an undesirable social hierarchy.
I think that there is some kind of parallel between both, and it's pretty interesting. That isn't to say that companies should use free software or develop free software from their self-interested point of view - as a company using free software you're almost in the same case as a worker, and as a company developing software it can align incentives to lead to better outcomes.
That being said, I'd say social democracy is an example of non-radical leftism.
I don't think that term applies at all in this context. Somewhat simplistically, Communism is 1) A viewpoint on the historical development of society, most notably the economy 2) An extrapolation from that viewpoint on where things are headed, which is judged by communists to be a bad path 3) Advocacy for a path that diverges from #2.
There's a dozen different major branches/interpretations, but at heart they are all socio-political/economic philosophies that are far more complex than simply who owns a thing.
About the only parallel I see between free software is that both want property to be owned by the community. Though even then, I'm not sure free software would have even the restrictions that might be imposed by community ownership. (The community might say "no, don't build that thing." etc.)
Perhaps in a purely communist society software would be free, but free software itself is not inherently communist.
How that relates to your argument I don't exactly know, but I guess it could be interpreted as saying that even if you admit that philosophy doesn't mean that you can't produce ""profit"" - especially if it is limited to software.
Also, in theory, you could be 100% accept communist philosophy yet operate a for profit business.
Maybe it's the HN bubble, but tech culture these days seems to have a strong element of anarcho-capitalism, taking the usual minarchism of libertarian thought just a small step further.
When people start believing that open source software is inherently superior in every situation, or that ideological purity is the most important consideration, they aren't making decisions in the best interest of the company. Engineers are especially prone to overestimating the downside risks of using closed source software (A long list of what-ifs such as "What if the vendor goes out of business without warning?") and underestimating the downsides of using open source alternatives (Notably, the inability to pick up the phone and have another company's engineers deal with the problem, per your contract). The situation is compounded by engineers who genuinely enjoy tinkering with open source software on the company's dime and, frankly, would prefer to be paid to do so rather than purchase a more efficient closed-source solution.
Of course, there are some situations where open-source software is practically superior to alternatives. I don't claim to suggest otherwise. However, the endless debates about ideological purity and avoiding hypothetical edge cases with 3rd party vendors frequently cloud decision making abilities in a business context.
For personal and open source projects, I'm all-in on free software alternatives. For business purposes, I'll evaluate the available options and try to make the best business decision for the company.