[hvasilev]

As a manager of a big tech company you are incentivized to increase profit and minimize cost. Might be slightly more painful to use a FOSS toolchain in your team, but your costs are zero. In comparison look at how much does a commercial IDE license like CLion costs per user.

It is a zero resistance environment. It gives the opportunity of the small to grow without any costs, but it also doesn't limit how big the big ones can get.

[brazzy]

Sorry, but that's complete nonsense in every aspect.

No competent manager will skimp on tools when they're paying today's developer salaries because those are the far bigger cost. You can buy plenty of expensive tools from the hourly rate equivalent of an engineer spending hours every week dealing with the shortcomings of crappy tools.

Conversely, a manager whose incompetence manifests as skimping on tools will just choose the cheapest commercial tool when there are no open source tools available, and that is almost guaranteed to be worse.

In fact, it's common for dysfunctional companies to insist on using commercial tools that are both very expensive and much more painful to use than readily available open source tools.

Edit:

> why is noone focusing on the fact that they are using software for free and profiting out of the product?

Because it is much better than having no free software and personal projects, self-study, and bootstrapped startups being only possible for the rich. I mean, there are Copyleft licenses that aim to prevent commercial use of free software, but isn't that exactly the "left leaning ideology" you didn't seem to like much above?

[OrderlyTiamat]

So if I understand correctly, the argument is that it drives down costs as opposed to proprietary alternatives. But how does this lead to monopolies?

Is it something like was suggested below by tsukurimashou, that companies takeover foss software so that it is essentially theirs? But I don't see how that is functional ly different from them just developing that software themselves (apart from higher costs for them). In this model at least everyone can see the source and has the freedom to use and modify as they see fit. I feel like there is still a step here that I'm missing.

[hvasilev]

It is a zero resistance environment. It gives the opportunity of the small to grow without any costs, but it also doesn't limit how big the big ones can get.

[OrderlyTiamat]

I see. To me that is then not something that would specifically lead to monopolies.