FOSS is free if your time is worthless.
There's plenty of situations in business where using it is an incredibly good idea. There's even more situations where you're better off just paying for a service.
There's plenty of situations in business where using it is an incredibly good idea. There's even more situations where you're better off just paying for a service.
OSS is all about leveraging "hidden" advantages agains competitors that have clear and obvious financial advantages over you. If you get it right, you win!
Of course, if you don't like risks and don't like "uncomputable" prices, or "prices unique to each buyer", then sure, be conservative, and stay away from FOSS.
2. You can still be locked into a single-supplier when you pay for third-party FOSS support. In fact, most third-party FOSS support comes from a single supplier.
3. FOSS that doesn't have a sustainable business model attached to it rarely serves the needs of enterprises. There's FOSS alternatives to Sharepoint, but what's your FOSS alternative to Tableau? Salesforce? Slack? Will you actually save money by using it, compared to just paying a vendor?
From a purely technical POV, I'm pretty sure that feasible alternatives exist to all of these, e.g. I don't think Tableau's data viz product does anything that couldn't also be done with relative ease in R. Of course, these commercial offerings extend way beyond the purely technical domain where FLOSS makes the most sense; but that has little to do with "sustainable business models" - R itself is plenty sustainable on its own - and a lot to do with extremely niche or obscure "needs of enterprises" that FLOSS projects are either not clearly aware of, or not very interested in supplying. Niche and obscure problem domains have always been problematic for the open source model, this is nothing new.
It's zingers like this that keep me coming back to threads like this one! "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
I use FOSS when it makes sense but 90% of the time the answer has been, 'just use what AWS has.'