Ultimately, the tools I try out are the ones that don't make me involve other people in it, whether to inform or to get approval. This is extremely important at the beginning - particularly when I don't know the tool beforehand, so testing it is a bet.
Thus, extrapolating from my experience, I'd consider the main problem with paid tooling is that it usually requires getting other people in the loop. Even if it's sold in a way where you could use your personal paid license at work, that fact is very often unclear from the license text - unclear enough that you probably don't want the risk of procurement/legal disagreeing with your assessment.
(If we're talking SaaS/anything with on-line components, there's no way I'm touching this on my own - I have enough headache with exports control around remote work, I'm not going to risk anything I do be considered technology transfer.)
I feel I'm not atypical with this - I suspect developers in general have an opposite relationship with software licensing to that of their employer. For a company, OSS is random, unpredictable - while commercial licensing is safe, because there's a contract and a way to sue someone. For a developer, OSS is easy to understood, zero risk, no need to involve other people - while commercial is completely arbitrary, every piece of software has a different license, and thus it's very strongly preferred to involve management/procurement/legal in this, because you don't want the liability on your shoulders.
I cannot possibly agree more with that last paragraph, you’ve summarised that so well.
A discussion I was party to recently was debating which of open source vs several competing commercial products to use for a new development. Chief complaint raised about open source product by the team members on the business side of things was “oh it’s open source, that means there’ll be no support right?”. Comparatively my teammate and I had the reverse reaction: we know for a fact the open source alternative is at least 90% as good, if not better than the alternatives, we don’t have to wait to go through the rigmarole of purchasing, approvals, waiting for someone to sign contracts, finance to sort things, finding out you need another key because another person will be working on it as well, discovering the support is invariably shitty, and then being stuck with it when it turns out to be poor software and the business side won’t budge, because that means they’ll need to do things again (which will take weeks at best) and they’ll inevitably just end up re-signing the contract for another year.
Ultimately, the tools I try out are the ones that don't make me involve other people in it, whether to inform or to get approval. This is extremely important at the beginning - particularly when I don't know the tool beforehand, so testing it is a bet.
Thus, extrapolating from my experience, I'd consider the main problem with paid tooling is that it usually requires getting other people in the loop. Even if it's sold in a way where you could use your personal paid license at work, that fact is very often unclear from the license text - unclear enough that you probably don't want the risk of procurement/legal disagreeing with your assessment.
(If we're talking SaaS/anything with on-line components, there's no way I'm touching this on my own - I have enough headache with exports control around remote work, I'm not going to risk anything I do be considered technology transfer.)
I feel I'm not atypical with this - I suspect developers in general have an opposite relationship with software licensing to that of their employer. For a company, OSS is random, unpredictable - while commercial licensing is safe, because there's a contract and a way to sue someone. For a developer, OSS is easy to understood, zero risk, no need to involve other people - while commercial is completely arbitrary, every piece of software has a different license, and thus it's very strongly preferred to involve management/procurement/legal in this, because you don't want the liability on your shoulders.