[BuckRogers]

SSRS is a big draw. There are other and probably better reporting tools, but the integration and support from MS is worth something to most companies. There's also simply the network effect at play and marketing, that MS has always backed that up with results. The money involved really isn't prohibitive for most small to mid-size companies that I've worked with. I've only seen the opposite, companies leaving their expensive UNIX licenses to move to an all-MS stack to save money. I have never seen large companies try to reduce their technology costs to zero with pure open source, because I think they intuitively know that you either pay with your licenses or you pay with maintaining a lot of expensive expertise, that also needs properly managed and effective. In the discussion of free as in freedom vs free as in beer, most companies core business is not technology, and they know there's no truly free beer and don't really care about the freedom. They want everything I've already mentioned, and the short and longterm support the license buys.

Outside of my professional career, with my personal projects I use SQLite, but if I were to build out something that intended to be larger scale business venture, I'd probably go with Azure SQL Database for multiple reasons. A large one being MS's overall integration, including their full control of the stack and CI/CD with .Net->Azure DevOps->github->Azure Pipelines->Azure PaaS/SQL Database. I admire what they're building, but a lot of people work outside of the MS realm. Companies don't tend to have a tech stack bone to pick as we do on HN, and many are already using part of the MS stack.

In sum, there's just a lot of business realities at play. I wouldn't personally run out and buy a SQL Server license myself, for what I do at home or with my (very) small side business, either.