@hakui >true believers can run on ideology alone but they're a minority
A real shame.

>most people only care about stuff like "does it Just Werk", "is the catastrophic failure rare enough and is the impact limited", "can i get economical utility out of doing this"
Most people are quite poor at judging such things and so keep using software that doesn't work, has catastrophic failures that aren't rare with large impacts and with a huge cost that negates economic utility (for example, windows).

>then people aren't going to make stuff based on free software if it means they have to hire someone to do a full code audit every time they want to make something. and then you wonder why the only ones in the market are proprietary
I don't see any case where a product would requires a code audit to use free software, that wouldn't require a code audit to use proprietary software.

Most proprietary software developers are clowns and you can't trust them to have audited their software.

Most free software does actually have a code quality higher than most proprietary software (for example, GNU software has shown to exhibit a much lower error rate per line than typical proprietary programs).

>yes no one's stopping you from making a comparable competitor with feature parity.
Many companies indeed are.

Patents make it legally impossible to implement certain things in free software.

There are many cases of lock-in and undocumented formats that makes a comparable "competitor" extremely difficult.

Even with all that, in all cases of free software with significant development, eventually the software does become functionally superior and keeps going.

>and for those free software projects that list a minimum cost of manpower, do you pay them that minimum cost in order to gain access to them?
I don't believe there is such case, but I would indeed do so for quality software.

>"what do i get out of it" is universal
That is sad a pathetic level of consciousness.

>then maybe you might start to understand why corpos want to make it so that the exchange of fiat for their software continues when it is the incentive of most people to not want to exchange fiat for software
Most corpos do *not* make it an exchange of fiat for their software anymore.

They make it an ongoing rent, otherwise the sabotaged software stops functioning.

Anyone with sanity wouldn't want to pay an ongoing rent for software to merely function.

Many businesses have the option of using free software without paying, but they make the choice to pay an ongoing rent to receive support and fixes to the software (which isn't generally offered with proprietary software - proprietary software companies will often accept bug reports, but will proceed to tell you to increase the monthly cost to receive the next version and see if it's fixed - and often it isn't).