"Companies with expensive tools have an obvious interest in convincing their best customers that the competition in inherently risky." The problem is that they

"Companies with expensive tools have an obvious interest in convincing their best customers that the competition in inherently risky." The problem is that they don't need to do this. In the open source community we're doing a great job all by ourselves. I've written open source libraries and platforms, I've also written proprietary software that uses open source. Log4j, Heartbleed, half of NPM etc weren't the work of Oracle lobbyists, they were avoidable fuckups caused by everyone relying on critical infrastructure that wasn't really maintained. I'd actually go further and say you overestimate the power of lobbying and underestimate the possibility of lobbyist's having a point. The primary argument these firms made against relying on OSS was that it's often just a bunch of random people with no incentive to do the un-fun work like security audits or patch backports. There's nobody who takes responsibility for things. That's true and is pretty much the core of Red Hat's business model so it's not like anyone can really dispute this. The software industry does need new approaches to how we use open source stuff, IMO. Sandboxing of libraries would go a long way. But we can't just pretend there's no problem here and it's all the work of shadowy corporations, it's naive ideological stuff.