Memes

I use OpenOffice and Libre Office on the regular at work.
Sorry, but Word is way way more advanced than both. Both in ease of use and extended feature set.

I'm not sure there's much of a consumer market for those products. At least not in the self-operated and self-hosted way you might be thinking. I feel like way too many of us here have major blinders on in the way non-experts or non-hobbyists approach a vast majority of technology and technology adjacent subjects.

Speaking as if I were a layman, why would I download and install a word processor when I can just login to gdocs and have it there?

And in regards to enterprise, you'd be hard pressed to find any tech crew willing to stake their career on open source, user facing tools that don't have a robust support structure in place.

Costa money to do all that though. That's the challenge. Bring able to fund development while still being open

You've got Firefox and Brave. Edge + Chrome are based on the free software Blink engine, while Webkit is one of the only free software projects Apple develops and maintains. Who doesn't use VLC? Bitwarden is a popular password manager. About 50% of the world uses Android, which is nominally free software with some proprietary components. Blender is the world's most successful free software project. A surprising amount of mainstream artists use Krita. People who download torrents are probably using a free software BitTorrent client like qbittorrent, Deluge, or Transmission, rather than uTorrent. A lot of people use the uBlock Origin extension, which is a free software content blocker.

And hey, everyone who has played DOOM was playing a game released under the GPLv2 in 1999, minus the game data.

File hosting isn't really an issue of free software, because very few people will host their own cloud storage server. It's more about relying on servers to provide a service rather than software, which is a good and bad thing.

This is kind of a neutral point, but a lot of software has become services accessed through a web client (browser). This means anyone on any operating system can access the service so long as they have a browser, which evens the playing field for us SerenityOS and Haiku users :^).

Gamepass. Get me a solution to that and I'm moving right now.

I tried the cloud app and it demanded I use a controller and not kb/mouse

Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior Typst? https://typst.app

Office software - OpenOffice

Free File Hosting - OpenSSH server and Filezilla

Im a business intelligence analysts and would love to have the opportunity to work with Tableu (not sure if its FOSS, or just OS), but everyone is on the PowerBI train, except the company I work with that for some reason goes with QlikSense that sucks.

Just because something is available for free doesn't mean it's better for all use cases. There are cases where Oracle will perform better than Postgres (and vice versa of course).

And there's a business case for finger pointing

security issue with your open source DB install? It's either your fault (configuration), or the fault of some possibly volunteer engineer (bug). But if you pay enough, the whole thing is Oracle's problem, and you can tell investors with a straight face that it's not your fault. And Oracle are big enough that it's an easy decision to defend should something go wrong (which is something of a self fulfilling prophecy, but that's the way it is).

But yeah, whenever I need a database it's Postgres :)

Business reasons. Some companies like to pay for licensing because that will lower the chance of getting wacked by a patent troll lawsuit. Vin addition they like being and to call someone when something goes wrong.

Even a database with no licensing fees costs money in terms of wages/salaried employee time to use, so while that cost advantage is real, there are costs on both sides. If MS has products you want to use that are much easier (read: cheaper) to use with their paid database than some free alternative, that's certainly a good reason to consider it.

The longer you use it, the less likely it is to pay off, but execs focused on short term profits don't weigh that very highly.

Who would pay for a database when you can get ~~a free one~~ Postgres?

Typically support is cheaper and many times infrastructure and high availability will be baked into the contract. Unless you are planning the service as a core business capability it's typically cheaper to support.

How so?