Why Free Software is better for your company

Commercial software is a business risk

The year is 2025 and we’ve seen a lot of disruption in commercial software recently, such as:

  1. The Broadcom acquisition of VMWare, leading to significantly hiked up prices and disruption in operation. Customers have reported an inability to download security patches, or even being unable to relicense at all. (And as Broadcom also cancelled Perpetual Licenses, this means that a lot of features companies rely upon stop working immediately)
  2. Atlassian, creators of Confluence, Jira and Trello cancelled self-hosting of their apps, forcing companies to migrate to their cloud products instead. (Not great for companies that prefer to keep their IP local)
  3. Paessler (Makers of enterprise monitoring and alerting platform, PRTG ) received significant investment by Turn/River, a venture capitalist firm. This resulted quickly with pricing rising 300 to 400% for existing customers.
  4. Venture Capitalist firms buying companies like Solarwinds, Splunk and many others causing concern amongst customers who expect much higher prices in the near future, worse support or reduced investment in development.
  5. Microsoft making a decision to require modern hardware for Windows 11, triggering the need to replace millions of perfectly good devices and generating a massive pile of e-waste.

Companies using such software, and there can’t be many that haven’t been affected by these or similar changes recently, are faced with a tough decision - pay a lot more for the product or spend a lot of time and money transferring your operations to an alternative product.

“Lock-in” was ever a cuss-word, but now it’s a major business risk that cannot be ignored.

The past is not the present

Historically, business would choose commercial partners over FOSS products for two main reasons;

Support

Whilst A) may seem like a very real and genuine concern - nobody wants to receive the phonecall at 3am to say their company’s entire infrastructure has crashed because of an obscure problem in one piece of software. When there’s no expert available to help you solve the problem, it makes for really difficult discussions with shareholders. Except that it’s very often no more of a concern than commercial software - Free Software doesn’t always mean a lack of support. And most definitely, free software is no more buggy than commercial software, and no less secure. That’s three things non-technical managers sometimes say, and three things thoroughly debunked over and again.

Software like Zabbix, Proxmox, Gitlab, Docker, Nextcloud, Wordpress, MongoDb, MariaDb, Grafana, Mattermost, ElasticSearch are all free to use, even for Enterprise companies. Yet all have Enterprise companies attached that offer support contracts to ensure you still have someone to phone at 3am to hold your hand and help you put things back together. What’s more, they normally provide training, just like companies selling you commercial software. Yes - that has a financial cost, so whilst Free Software can be entirely free, extra services aren’t. That is the business model.

Stability

This is no longer a reason to choose commercial software with companies being bought, asset stripped and customers milked like fat cattle. Large FOSS projects in 2025 are often very professional with rigorous release testing (something that Microsoft Windows patches in particular have struggled with, and Crowdstrike bringing down “a third of the internet” with a badly released update in July 19th, 2024 is forever etched in many sysadmin’s calendars).

No complicated licencing or concealed pricing

Enterprise software rarely shows its price. It’s a shake-down - you’ve got to ask for a quote, and then wait whilst their agent researches your company to find out how much they can possible charge you. It costs the most they can get away with. Sure - that’s capitalism - but it leaves a nasty taste.

Don’t waste time arguing with sales staff for licence renewals

Your licence is expiring and suddenly you’re bombarded with your new best friend, the sales agent. The back and forth begins and takes a lot of your valuable time. The price has gone up - why? And why does it go down again if you threaten to leave, after often hours of negotiating.

FOSS is better in every way

So in short, Free Open Source Software is often:

  • More Secure
    Having the source available for peer review is a proven benefit to security.
  • Less unstable
    Major projects are often more widely used than their commercial equivalents, so releases are tested on a far wider user base and hardware
  • Cheaper
    Although the software is free, to be a fair comparison we need to include the cost of support if you’re unable to provide it in-house. That’s usually cheaper than the licence
  • Time Saving
    Whilst you may still need to buy support contracts, they’re usually more transparently prices and take less back and forth arguing on pricing
  • Less likely to change overnight
    Investment capital firms and asset strippers are not interested in Software that can earn them no money. FOSS licensing would prevent them from making it closed source, and attempts to do so historically have led to the code being forked and a free alternative continued in some form. Additionally, they cannot stop your software working at the end of a contract in the way commercial licensing can. Business Continuity depends upon software doing the same tomorrow as it is doing today.

…than it’s commercial counterparts.

Of course, most companies can’t avoid using commercial software entirely. It’s required for some hardware systems, for cloud-based services, for compatibility with business partners and so on. But where there is a choice, perform due diligence and consider FOSS alternatives. Your IT budget will thank you for it. Your business stability will thank you for it.