Translation: Companies are pissed that the free software gravy-train is over and how they actually have to start paying for it. This is the way it should have been for the past decade.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I suppose if folks are getting to capture more dollars for the value they deliver, that's always a good thing. Better to own your own biz versus being a cog in someone else's machine (IMHO).
And there's economies of scale. A few cents from the payment by each of our customers adds up to a decent amount of money to spend on an open source project.
I guess my point is that I feel like what GP refers to as "free" is actually just "developed/operated/maintained internally"... these commercial services are still by and large based on free software but you're paying someone else to do the work your internal IT capability used to do.
This couples with a general trend I've observed of organizations shifting their IT workload from inside to outside via PaaS/SaaS providers. This could be viewed as a form of outsourcing... in the '90s enterprises were moving their IT functions to India. Now they're moving them to a hundred different contractors, each supporting one system.
Bonus, unlike SaaS, you have complete control over the damned thing. New "features" won't suddenly get added to your tools that break your workflow, you can add new features if you need them without begging some vendor to whom you are a tiny insignificant nobody, etc.
Additionally, as a rather dedicated Matrix user and advocate, it's clearly less stable and usable than Slack at present. See e.g. the effort towards a complete rewrite of the Riot on mobile and significant changes to Riot on web. Most third-party clients are not feature complete and are often rather unstable themselves (e.g. I am a heavy user of the Weechat python plugin but it takes expertise to get it up and running). The pricing no doubt accommodates the fact that anyone adopting Matrix for business use is going out on a limb to some extent.
I think that's the wrong way of putting it, since that Patreon money is clearly paying for the open component of Matrix. That's work that needs to be done anyway, whether Slack exists or not, and whether businesses choose to host their service instances via Vector or not. And it's definitely a Good Thing that FLOSS suppliers can now get funded via those crowd-based mechanisms - both for aligning incentives and for enhancing the overall "community"/"bazaar" aspect that has helped make a lot of FLOSS software successful in the past.
I don't remember many enterprises that relied on large scale free software that was anything like SaaS products today... they were spending plenty on software...
Do people actually do this?
I don't know of any companies that are still using Coldfusion and I haven't had to touch it since 2012 (thank god), but it certainly was a common thing for awhile.
I feel like this narrative is still apples to oranges and the concerns expressed are more about managing the costs all the SaaS products, not having to pay...
Even worse were customers who would buy once license but use the software across their organisation. As soon as I dealt with that those customers started buying more licenses.