The author answers the title question for himself. > For all of the options there are open options available, but yet it seems that in the daily grind the valu

The author answers the title question for himself. > For all of the options there are open options available, but yet it seems that in the daily grind the value of “freedom” diminishes when proprietary products offer a better overall experience. I love me some open tools. Open tools are getting a lot better over time. But, people are not often enough finding them to be better to use than the closed tools. The closed tools are not free-as-in-beer, but they are cheap enough to justify their cost. > Tweaking and tuning a free product compared to purchasing a license or subscription to a service is just more convenient — and potentially cheaper. Theoretically, this might be possible. But practically, it's not panning out for the tools mentioned in the article. Sublime text cost $70. A senior engineer tweaking and tuning a free text editor for a single hour is more expensive than that. The real question is > Is it just because closed products by nature create better user experiences, where as Open Source is best at low level things that are a commodity? Open source does have some conflict with the nature of humans. It suffers greatly from the Tragedy of the Commons. That's not a black&white, unavoidable doom sentence. It's an obstacle that must be directly addressed if an open project hopes to succeed.