I skimmed the article. One thing it doesn't cover is a sort of frictional cost coming from poor documentation that is more common in commercial software.
One software I have to use for complex scientific simulations has a pretty complicated data model and the doc is not nearly descriptive enough. It also only tells you what something is, and not how you might want to go about modeling something. I often have more questions than when I started after reading through the doc. The only avenue for resolution is to talk to the vendor, which costs money. You can't see the source code or really any level of what is going on inside. It's a black box. The tool itself works okay and is pretty flexible, but I'll never willingly use it again. I don't need to see all the source, but it's often the best option if the documentation is severely lacking.
This is probably a rarity on HN, but I thought I'd share. In a way, software freedom is also about not wasting my time. In a different way I could bring up Mathematica, which is some amazingly powerful software that few on HN have used outside of the more limited Wolfram Alpha. On the downside, the licensing was kind of a pain to manage if you're not in a school or company that is a major user. It's also annoying that I couldn't have more than like two notebooks running at a time as the desktop version limited me to like 2 cores which is kind of insulting for the cost. I get that they don't want someone just buying a single desktop license and running it on a server with 100 cores, but in the end it was just irritating.
One software I have to use for complex scientific simulations has a pretty complicated data model and the doc is not nearly descriptive enough. It also only tells you what something is, and not how you might want to go about modeling something. I often have more questions than when I started after reading through the doc. The only avenue for resolution is to talk to the vendor, which costs money. You can't see the source code or really any level of what is going on inside. It's a black box. The tool itself works okay and is pretty flexible, but I'll never willingly use it again. I don't need to see all the source, but it's often the best option if the documentation is severely lacking.
This is probably a rarity on HN, but I thought I'd share. In a way, software freedom is also about not wasting my time. In a different way I could bring up Mathematica, which is some amazingly powerful software that few on HN have used outside of the more limited Wolfram Alpha. On the downside, the licensing was kind of a pain to manage if you're not in a school or company that is a major user. It's also annoying that I couldn't have more than like two notebooks running at a time as the desktop version limited me to like 2 cores which is kind of insulting for the cost. I get that they don't want someone just buying a single desktop license and running it on a server with 100 cores, but in the end it was just irritating.