I've no idea why I'm receiving downvotes either. I guess a few folks are angry about having their business model attacked with reality. Addressing your post:

I've no idea why I'm receiving downvotes either. I guess a few folks are angry about having their business model attacked with reality. Addressing your post: Software isn't a car and the marginal cost to manufacture more software licenses is zero. When I direct an hour of effort to our commercial software, I'm gaining many dollars of future passive revenue thanks to that created wealth. Contrast that with services and a 'free' product, where each hour of effort gets a support dollar but generates no wealth at all! Pitted against that means of generating revenue, a service company giving away its product is going to lose in the long-run every time. To see this, just look at the software marketplace: Aside from the solitary black-swan exception of RedHat (which arguably sells licenses instead of services anyhow), where are the profitable open source support contract companies? I can spool up 3,000 software licenses sold today without batting an eye (and add in support charges on top of that if needed) making a ton of cash with which to hire employees for product improvement, but 3,000 hours of support is a huge cost requiring a great many employees to manage before even a penny of profit is obtained. Bringing this back to my original point: Commercial software companies can easily dominate 'free' open source alternatives given that reality, so they can safely ignore their free 'competition'.