Because in most cases, it's not about the quality of the product. I've had cases where using a (free, open source) reverse proxy to implement SSO and TLS termination would save 5-digit figures (on the side closer to 6 digits) yearly from upgrading the licensing a product we used. That was rejected because then we wouldn't have anyone to point our finger at if something goes wrong with the product. It's about the "support contracts", not about the products themselves.
Which is in itself a fucking joke because now everything is outsourced to some clueless person in a call center half-way around a world, or you get to chat with an LLM. Either way, it has been ages since the "support contracts" actually resulted in a problem that wasn't ultimately solved by ourselves, not them.
Which is in itself a fucking joke because now everything is outsourced to some clueless person in a call center half-way around a world, or you get to chat with an LLM. Either way, it has been ages since the "support contracts" actually resulted in a problem that wasn't ultimately solved by ourselves, not them.