I never once said others are stupid. My point is, free is not free. There is always a cost of some kind involved. My experience is that "free" software often has fewer features, is harder to use, and takes more of my time to get things done. That costs me money.

It is not always the case, but usually it is.

I'll give you some examples. I've been using Git for a year. Great product. Lots of features. But for my small team, where we're all in the same location, working on relatively small projects, I haven't seen any advantages over Subversion for our environment. Does that mean people who use it are stupid or that Git is useless? Nope, not at all. There are lots of scenarios where Git makes lots of sense. But I am never going to look at the code. I have no desire. I have no time. I'm too busy creating great solutions for my customers. If I run into a scenario where Git doesn't work for what I need, I'll look for something else long before I dig into the source code.

We also use TeamCity. Again, a fantastic product. I highly recommend it. It has both a free and pay-for version. But the documentation is horrible. It took quite a while to get it setup and running the way we wanted because of poor documentation. Something like TFS would have taken much less time to setup and configure.

That's not to say a free product that has gone through extensive testing, yet comes from a big company is better than an alternative free option. Adobe Reader is a piece of junk. Memory and CPU hog and is slow. I prefer FoxIt Reader. Fast. Lightweight. Great product.


>You shouldn't have to look under a hood either.
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>Sometimes it makes sense.
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>How come peoples books mysteriously disappear from Kindles?
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>If you were free too look, you'd be free to know.
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>But you're not.
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>Some people think they should be free to look under the hood. That their cpu shouldn't be operating by principles of a firm rather than a user.
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>Just because you don't want that freedom, doesn't mean others are stupid for wanting it.
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>Shame on you.