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Re:When free software isn't practically superior (2015) by kelnos on Thursday December 17, 2020 @07:54PM (#25462507)
I think you're still missing the point: the freedom bits are not there for "idealogical purity", they're there because they provide practical benefits: the ability to inspect and modify the program's source code, and to build and run modified versions, without getting anyone's permission to do so. The FSF does believe that there ethical components as well, but you need not subscribe to them to see the benefits of free software.

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.

Re:When free software isn't practically superior (2015) by dividedbyzero on Thursday December 17, 2020 @08:27PM (#25462738)
As a poor old 1x dev, I absolutely cannot fix any arbitrary complex issue in any arbitrarily large codebase written in any language at all, using any obscure build tooling, any complex framework, any architecture pattern at all, while not breaking anything else, within a timeframe that doesn't make most commercial support response times look enticing.
Re:When free software isn't practically superior (2015) by ohazi on Thursday December 17, 2020 @09:06PM (#25462993)
Maybe not, but you can probably write a python script to parse the (open, documented, text-based) file format of an open-source tool and perform some important action that the tool doesn't support. Or maybe someone already wrote a library that parses the file format which lets you jump straight to pulling out the data that you want.

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.

Re:When free software isn't practically superior (2015) by kelnos on Sunday December 20, 2020 @10:43PM (#25491942)
I suspect you underestimate your ability, but even if you're not, there are many who can. Regardless, fixing a problem in the short term might not mean actually fixing a bug in the upstream source; it might just be reading through the code to figure out how things work so you can implement a workaround outside the code. That might not be possible without the code being open.