Lawyers are expensive which is why most folks settle when they encounter legal issues in life and business. When you get a traffic ticket or auto accident do you hire a lawyer? Most do not.
We have lots of people running around with "open source" projects worried about licenses when in reality they it provides them little if any protection against anything. This is owner of "open source" projects with dead community and fewer users worried about being exploited by "commercial" corporations and thus has foolishly believes that they can entrap "commercial user" with fancy IF/THEN/ELSE, statement in GUI license prompt. If tomorrow AT&T stiffs my bill with an extra $500 I and they refused to reverse the charges, I would probably eat those fees rather then waste more time and effort with money taking AT&T to court to get a judgment against them.
Many of these "open source" projects don't need licensing because no one is using because they don't have anyone to license too. You can't pay a commercial user to use this code even if you wanted to. These projects are akin to the people that start side businesses but spend all the time and money registering for an LLC and SEO advertising but have no work or customers for their side business but appear busy day and night working on their hustle and reports losses on their income tax and pay the accountant extra to setup tax shelters for imaginary income that aren't coming but that's what they saw someone else do and thus they need this and that tax service as well.
Not just phone support, even places that have a physical presence or storefront are almost completely useless. Many times all the customer support representative does is update a "trouble ticket" on the automated computer system.
I've seen mailed letters from companies that say nothing more than: "Thank you for writing to us about issue ABC, issue ABC has been assigned case number XYZ, we will reach out again within XX days, please refer to ticket number XYZ when contacting the company." Then when you visit the physical bank or government DMV they tell you to go back home and wait to receive your driver's license or debit/credit card replacement.
The local plumber that supports my neighbor has an office about a block from my home yet if you call the number it's routed to some answering service three states away and the plumber never answers any phone calls. Then after work is performed, the plumbing company expects you to pay online and never accepts cash. Good luck if you have a customer service issue with the plumbing job or billing because it takes forever to get a hold anyone that can resolve anything.
In some areas if you live in apartments, folks actually knock on your door to sell you religion and vacuum cleaners. 2023 and still we have door to door sales.
If you had cash, they would rob you for it, but since, it's digital payments and most people don't carry cash, it not economically or practical for fraudsters to steal cash.
This type of thinking isn't new or limited to only tech folks. Almost everyday in family court there are parents who think they can just "kidnap" their children away during a custody divorce and ignore the family law judge. Most of the time, it doesn't end well.
Find a lawyer that's willing to do that for you. Then show up to court and complete all the legal paperwork. How many do you think are going to do that? How much do you think it's going to cost?
Companies don't want to support internal products with in-house resources that cost too much when they can get it cheaper from contractor or vendor or opensource.
Who are you kidding? Most engineers don't know what and who they are designing and building for. Engineers sticking together? These are the same folks that fork over every microaggression to release a command-line tool that did the same thing the last three releases did except it’s not rewritten in Rust.
Kodak had prototypes of digital cameras in the 1960's but they were afraid it would cannibalize film sales so it died in meetings. The United States Post Office had online bill pay and digital certificate PKI email system in the 1990's but never releases it beyond a few of their vendors due in-fighting and the fear of losing first-class mail volume.
Some people know about Linux but aren't going to touch it and there are some that touch it but wish nothing to do with it when they aren't configuring servers. It's not necessary limited to Linux, some people use Macs when they work on PCs at the office, but the greater question is what would switching Linux provide to the switchers when you claim, "It should answer the needs of the vast majority of people". If my car is fine for my transport needs, why would I buy a truck?
I don't understand this phenomena in the Linux community of trying to convert anyone and everyone to Linux. But then again, I'm not want to convert others to my religion, sports team or car model.
Yes, there are Mac and Windows evangelist, but there's more and they are louder in the Linux community. You would think for a community that claims to support "freedom" and "opensource," they would live and let live what others use for operating systems.
And how would these 14 survive if they are the only ones left? Do you know that there's a whole support team to support them in space? It's not just 14 people. There are hundreds on the ground supporting them.
And what's the point of it in space? Knowledge doesn't disappear when it's not on wikipedia. If humans are still around they will continue contributing to knowledge. Just because it's not printed or recorded doesn't mean that information or knowledge doesn't exist.
Not just electronics, go read the print quality of some of your paper receipts from three years ago and see if you can make heads or tails or where you purchased the item. Ever see photos from photo albums long ago?
So many shills in the "opensource" and "freedom" Linux community. Harp all day long about how "freedom" yet cry and troll when developers don't support a Linux distro and troll all day about getting others to convert to Linux or specific Linux distro.
If you're for "freedom" software then live and let live what others use for operating systems.
Even before online, newspaper would "distribute" their papers to hotels and college dorms to "invisible" subscribers to increase the count of their subscriptions. And let's not even get into how radio and TV viewers are counted via Nelson.
You're right we don't really know the real reasons why Document Foundation charged the price they did, after all they could also put the app on the Apple Store without charging as well, and some developers do put apps on the Apple Store without any costs to the end-user.
There's a bunch of other related costs associated with commerce on apps. This is why some developers don't "charge" for apps or don't setup their own storefronts. Take credit card charge-backs or fraud disputes. By going through the Apple Storefront, Document Foundation is outsourcing that headache to Apple.
Enough with "studies." I have multiple studies correlating that smokers survive COVID-19 hospitalization better than non-smokers. Should we adopt smoking as a health policy against COVID? I don't think it would be a wise recommendation when factoring in other health risks associated with smoking. There's a few studies showing how SAT scores declined once American studies stopped praying in school.