[radmuzom]

The "much" better off is an assumption. If I remember correctly, Fogcreek primarily uses a Microsoft stack; so did lot of people who used to hang around in the Business of Software forum run by Joel Spolsky. Most of them had bootstrapped companies rather than use a lot of VC money to buy expensive tools. Most of them did quite well making money with their business. Using open tools is not a criterion for both technical or business success.

[ghshephard]

Joel Spolsky - former Microsoft Product Manager? Yes, it's not particularly surprising that they would use Microsoft Products - their incredible familiarity with the product would offset any downstream licensing costs.

Small business usually get everything for free (or nobody bothers to check in on their licensing status, at the very least, they run on a massive discount using "developer editions").

Very large businesses have so much bureaucratic overhead, that unless their core business is Software/service (I.E. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc...) - the cost of software licenses is minor, and anything they can save by going with something "Standard and Supported" is worth the offset.

But, anybody interested in trying to run their small-medium business on something like Oracle Enterprise edition on their 16 Core Server will quickly start taking a second look at Postgress/MariaDB once they see what the annual licensing costs for Oracle are. Partitioning and Optimizer are only worth so much...

[jacquesm]

Fogcreek is run by ex microsoft people that had extensive experience with the stack before starting fogcreek, it made excellent sense for them to use what they already knew how to use.