[kpil]

In the ancient times GNU and the free BSD programs provided a vastly better user experience than the native tools in just about every commercial Unix system.

Also the window managers were at least slightly less awkward to use and at least tweekable.

I think there are a lot of specialised software development tools and products that are free or open source that are generally better than their commercial alternatives.

Although it's complicated as a lot of large players are putting a lot of money into free or open alternatives while still convincing their customers to pay a lot of money for their enterprise alternatives. (I wonder how they do it. I am actually reluctant to use a free database server although it's not uncommon for the commercial database we use to have rather horrid bugs that won't even be fixed since its virtually impossible to reproduce the problem in another system, and we can't debug properly without the source.)

It's only mass market applications and games that gives you enough money to totally outcompete free, maybe a small reason is that typically only a small fraction of the audience can code. I guess the same is true to some extent also for specialised tools in other domains, like financial or medical software, were the users typically can't code and there might be legislation and regulations too.