Not to take away from your point, but you can be sure that most (almost all) companies that create non-trivial high quality software use a lot of free software

Not to take away from your point, but you can be sure that most (almost all) companies that create non-trivial high quality software use a lot of free software to create it. This is the advantage they have. They can use their resources very efficiently to pick an choose the right combination of free stuff and also pick and choose which parts to implement out of their own pocket. The open source movement is like government subsidies in that it helps companies make better products with fewer own resources spent.