If I was better versed in writing and happened to be someone relevant, at the very least I’d support the viewpoint that open source is good for preventing takeovers and software dependencies turning hostile (e.g. Valkey and OpenSearch at least existing) and preventing being held financially hostage in times of uncertainty (e.g. many Linux server side distros are free and FOSS relational DBs won’t bankrupt you).

Yet perhaps far too often people opt for Windows Server or SQL Server or Oracle DB, or other software like that - if you have a good reason to use them, sure, go ahead, but that shouldn’t be your default. I don’t want my tax money to be wasted so much when for at least a significant amount of projects out there, alternatives exist.

I’ve literally heard people say in person that “we need paid support” even when they don’t and while I’m not sure what lead to that behavior of trying to shift blame and cover your own asses, but cut it out. If you need support so bad, get an org for FOSS projects or contribute directly in exchange for it!

This also has implications on development that you normally don't think about - I have personally suffered due to having to use a shared Oracle DB for development (one dev breaking something breaks it for everyone) and not being able to easily setup containers especially because Oracle XE doesn't have feature parity and refuses to run the migrations. Just fucking use PostgreSQL, or even MariaDB.

Same goes for file formats, it made me quite angry when my university mandated that I use Microsoft Office for writing my bachelor's and master's papers, when LibreOffice is mostly good enough (only caveat was the references tracking being kind of jank, but in large part due to the university having very specific requirements in regards to how the references have to be formatted; personally I'd just prefer thesis.md/LaTeX/whatever but I guess we can't have everything). Same for Windows on pretty much all the computers. My country is already poor as shit, we might as well just acknowledge that and stop overpaying for literally everything to greedy orgs. They didn't even buy local and use something like OnlyOffice or paid someone that provides managed Nextcloud hosting or whatever.