It's not illuminating to make inferences from freemium marketing shadows or feature comparisons, particularly if you want lessons you can apply today. Follow t

It's not illuminating to make inferences from freemium marketing shadows or feature comparisons, particularly if you want lessons you can apply today. Follow the money. Initially it was from VM licenses, from netscape for browsers, Oracle for databases, and Borland for IDE's (Borland also wrote the first JIT). But except for databases, they were non-exclusive, and JavaSoft's free offerings undercut their licensees. Then IBM cut a 10 year deal while Microsoft's license went to court for trying to add features to get lock in. At this time IBM created a free Eclipse to undercut the IDE market (Borland), with SWT as an alternative to Swing to capture developers for leverage. But the big money was in enterprise, so J2EE licensing was much more airtight for Oracle, BEA, et al. That was a successful and long-lived franchise that also drove storage and compute revenues. But people hated the complexity and compute resources and Google and Apple both decided to build rather than buy, so we got Spring, Swift, Go, and the whole native and container ecosystem. You have to be aggressive and strict in building a monopoly, but you should be gentle and forgiving in maintaining it. Both Microsoft and AWS learned this lesson.