This is meant to be an in-depth discussion on the various pros and cons of free software versus paid software.
I'm a strong advocate of free and open-source software (these are not the same thing btw. Something can potentially be open-source and still earn money), however, I am not going to lie, I've definitely noticed a quality difference in software and maintenance of free software, especially where it does not have a corporate backing.
I think this is because at the end of the day, we must all earn money in order to live. When Microsoft started, Bill Gates argued and even earned a bad rap in the free software community because he said that professionally-developed software would be higher quality than free software and that developers should earn money for their work.
I don't agree that commercial software is _always _higher quality than free software, however, I do agree with those other points. If someone is being paid to develop software, it allows them the freedom to upkeep the software without the concern of having to find another income while doing so, allowing them to spend more time on the work. I believe that this fact does contribute to better software quality and certainly prolonged maintenance.
As a malware analyst for example, I use many professional file analysis tools and the paid ones are hands-down the most powerful and reliable tools I have. There is a Ubuntu distribution which also has decent malware analysis tools called Remnux, but I'm not going to lie, the tools are very weak compared with my main paid tools, and they also have not been updated in a long time.
I want to hear your ideas on all of this. I'm noticing sort of a "hybrid" of sorts now where basically companies with a lot of cash like Google and Microsoft have realized that developing free and/or open-source software does contribute to their exposure or profit model, and have begun to corporately back such projects. These projects have the advantage of having professional development attention, but the disadvantages of having a corporate goal in mind. Chrome is getting blasted for this by Mozilla right now, with privacy demoing the clear difference in interest here.
There is definitely an observable difference. In the most broad terms:
Both types of software feature innovative solutions to problems, have the full range of code quality (from awful, to state of the art), and have slow support.
The biggest difference I see between Open Source Software and Proprietary Software is that the OSS tends to be available long after the availability of the proprietary software from the same era has disappeared.
Another difference - with OSS you are able to review the code and avoid using software that is horribly made, but with proprietary software you often have no way of even knowing what the state of the code looks like. Much software (regardless of license) is duct-taped together, at least with OSS you have the means to verify this for yourself.
If I was going to try to get support for a 10-year-old piece of OSS I would probably have better luck than trying to get support for a 10-year-old piece of proprietary software.
If I was going to try to re-download a piece of software from 15 years ago, I'd probably have a much easier time finding and acquiring OSS compared to finding proprietary software.
So, having said all that - if you needed to pick a solution to use today and you wanted to be able to still get support for it in 10 years, or still use it at all in 15 years, I would think OSS would get you farther. Not all OSS is going to survive, but it seems virtually all proprietary software has a very short life.
Also - what happens to support for proprietary software when the company who made it goes bust (even if it's brand-new). Suddenly you're going from 'commercial support' to 'no support' instead of 'slow support' with OSS.
Now, from a developer's standpoint I will choose OSS licenses for my own work every time, and if I'm going to be using another tool in my work I pretty much only will touch OSS. The reason? A number of times in my career already, the owner of a project I have done work on has come to me with legal paperwork for me to sign stating that 100% of the code I submitted to the codebase I own, and that I accept FULL liability for any claims made against the codebase in the future.
Once you've had to sign a few of those papers you start sweating, double-checking that every plugin, every snippet, every library you used is indeed free for you to use (and sell) in another piece of software you're working on.
Because of this, all of the software I produce is open-source, just so I can be sure I (and everybody else) can easily legally re-use the code in any new projects without having to worry.
In general, proprietary software seems to have a shorter lifespan.
Here's a snapshot on what happened to some software that I've used since around 2000 (plus/minus a few years) and what happened since then:
Software that I picked up around the 2007-2010 period (around this period open source software picked up significantly in terms of quality and/or popularity)
Survival Scorecard - 75% survival rate for open source vs 20% survival rate for proprietary software
Quality Scorecard
The title of the question seems unrelated to the body. In any case, the quality of the software is orthogonal to the price or availability of the code.
Comparing prices, the advantage of free software is that it's free; paid SW has no inherent advantage. Comparing openness, the advantage of OSS is that I get to look at the code and improve it if I want to, closed software has no inherent advantage.
I work as a developer so I don't have many chances to use closed SW in my line of work anyway, pretty much open libraries/frameworks or the code I write myself.
Your question is beyond software and is related only to business.
Nothing is free
Freemium model gives companies marketing, additional traffic, potential customers, test results, feedback. Some tools are used to support other products or business overall. Chrome and other browsers is an example. More people use Chrome, more control Google has on the Internet market. Google search and advertising is main Alphabet's source of revenue and to be the Leader on the market, Alphabet has to adapt all the time, thus, you see Open Source OS for mobile - Android, Free and fast browser - Chrome, open source ML library - TensorFlow, and much more. When you look on a bigger picture, you see that all those "free" tools for you are not really free. You see Google ads, you give your privacy and data to them.
Without free software, commercial prices could be much lower for anyone
Free software not only provides in most cases bad quality, instability, awful support, but takes market share from commercial software and engineers' money. It means that price is higher then it could be without free alternatives.
Nonetheless, free software and more competition leads to better products
On the other hand, more competition is always good. Overall, it forces some tools to become better, offer much higher quality services/products, new functions, simpler UX, whatever.
Free software, after all, allows anyone to achieve more goals, be more independent, and move technology and humanity forward.