In my personal experience, it is not so much about the money, but about the work involved to find out the specific conditions for a license. As most open sourc

In my personal experience, it is not so much about the money, but about the work involved to find out the specific conditions for a license. As most open source software uses similar licenses, there are fewer surprises. Quite often, some extra administration is required, just to ensure that a license is used correctly. More recently, with subscription based pricing models, I find it very hard to determine the actual cost upfront. With free software this insecurity is not present. Possibly the most important factor here is trust. With open source communities, I find it fairly easy to determine the quality of a product, and its development team. Commercial companies tend to hide their internal communication, making it harder to assess priorities and how problems are resolved. I wonder if these issues could be solved by intermediaries.