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.<p>Also the window managers were at least slightly less awkward to use and at least tweekable.<p>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.<p>Although it&#x27;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&#x27;s not uncommon for the commercial database we use to have rather horrid bugs that won&#x27;t even be fixed since its virtually impossible to reproduce the problem in another system, and we can&#x27;t debug properly without the source.)<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;t code and there might be legislation and regulations too.