This is exceedingly strange. You pooh-pooh a free solution and proceed
to suggest three proprietary and very expensive ones that J. Random
Java Hobbyist can surely not afford.

The obvious thing for someone with no vested interest to do is to
suggest the free solution and pooh-pooh the expensive ones. Which cup
of coffee will I want? The decent $1 cuppa at Tim's or the ludicrously
expensive fancy-pants flavor of the week from Starbucks? You do the
math.

OTOH, the obvious thing for someone who does have a vested interest to
do is to pooh-pooh the free solution and all of the competing
proprietary ones and recommend only the specific proprietary one that
they make money off.

It looks like we're witnessing a phenomenon whereby Big Business is
being supported in the abstract, for its own sake, irrespective of
corporate rivalries. I've seen a few other things in the last year or
so that point to a general low level push by a subset of the
population to persuade people that free/cheap/commodity is bad and
brand-name/expensive/whatever is good without peddling specific
brands. In other words, not one brand advertising that brand but a
whole industry apparently self-promoting in a cooperative way.
Oligopolistic behavior?

Other examples include the subtle but discernible and quite systematic
way that over the last couple of decades social mores have been
modified to make it impossible to date without spending money on a
wide variety of different product categories. It's just not possible
to date on a budget -- to have a dating life requires budgeting at
least a couple hundred a month on having it, comparable to car
insurance or winter heating costs and four times a typical monthly
phone bill with mild to moderate long distance or cellular usage;
closer to eight times a monthly home-broadband-internet bill. This is
obviously gratuitous -- it ought to be possible to meet people and get
together simply by walking into town and going to public parks or main
street or such areas and then get to know them. But it isn't, or
doesn't work, versus using venues you have to pay to use (e.g. bars,
clubs as in nightclubs, or clubs as in interest groups or whatever
with membership fees, or similarly) and spending money on a variety of
consumables (mainly assorted cosmetics, for women, and various things
for men, and sizable quantities of ethanol-laced beverages). Somehow
it's gotten arranged -- the fix is in. But however it was done seems
very subtle, perhaps very indirect manipulation or even self-
organizing somehow. A pareto-nonoptimal Nash equilibrium? Even then
that can be a symptom of a rigged game. Who benefits? A whole slew of
large industries, notably the alcoholic-beverage and the fragrance/
cosmetics industries. Even rivals' ads have in common the message that
to have a social life you need their product, and it seems that that
sort of thing becomes self-fulfilling, as everyone expects their date
to have similar products. Those industries get to write their own
tickets! Oh, and there's the other thing that tends to be needed -- a
car. Not having a car is basically immediate disqualification. Having
a car is of course expensive. The car is expensive. Insurance is
expensive. Fuel is expensive, and getting more so.

In the software industry case it seems like an organized FUD campaign
against FOSS, probably spearheaded by Microsoft, but probably a lot of
the BS, including that in the post I'm replying to, is simply the
result of saturation advertising by proprietary software companies
whose ads consistently position one commercial product above the
others, but all commercial products above FOSS products. The old
tactic of the Big Lie once again, until people start believing it.
Believing they get what they pay for, even though they sooner or later
start wondering why commercial products tend to be slower, more
bloated, buggier, and more ridden with security holes, with poorer
support and less response in particular to security problems --
sitting on exploit reports and doing nothing, or stonewalling when an
exploit is in the wild, rather than *doing* something to fix things.
This is what the Microsofts and other proprietary software companies
of the world position as being superior to FOSS. And people buy it
hook, line, and sinker. Why? Apparently because the price tag makes
them incorrectly jump to the conclusion that since it sells for more,
it must be worth that much more. When it's really just priced that
high because of artificial scarcity and the ability to arbitrarily set
prices without much force-feedback from the market.

A third example is the tendency of the physical infrastructure of our
towns and cities to be designed to be hostile to pedestrians and,
especially, to cyclists. No doubt Big Auto, Big Steel, and especially
Big Oil are to thank here, although it's probably more a matter of
campaign funding and bribing zoning regulators and the like than
public advertising with consistent elements this time. Putting in
sidewalks and especially usable benches presumably gets you an
immediate 50% reduction in your future campaign donations from big
businesses. Local merchants whose shops benefit from foot traffic can
pay only a fraction as much to support putting these in as the big
oil, steel, and car companies can to support not doing so, or even
destroying pre-existing ones as an "unfortunate side effect" of some
urban renewal project or another.

In all of these cases, Joe Consumer, and especially people in lower
income brackets, and generally the majority of the population, are
made worse off to enrich just a few, and yet somehow are prevented
from just saying "No!" and using their collective market and voting
power to make that "No!" carry some weight. Because of a fourth trend
-- isolating people from one another and preventing them from forming
true communities of ordinary-joes, while bombarding them with
commercially-motivated messages (advertising, and subtler stuff in the
mainstream media). No wonder people spend a lot, overeat, and do all
kinds of other stuff trying to fill some sort of void or another but
never feeling happy. There's also the whole "rat-race" thing -- having
to kiss a.s and suck up and schmooze your way up some corporate
ladder, pulling double-overtime three nights a week and working every
other weekend, just to not get sacked in the next round of layoffs,
nevermind to get an actual promotion. Something's distorted the labor
market so that it has 11%+ unemployment but those that are employed
are *over*employed, and often in work they're overqualified for. Full
employment with four-day/64-hour workweeks would be much more even
distribution, so why doesn't the market trend in that direction? Again
it must involve unequal bargaining power, with employers (=
corporations) too powerful and able to distort the labor market to
their own advantage (cheap labor kept obsequious by fear of job loss).

Of course, I've no idea how to fix any of this. Communism is something
that keeps being tried and keeps failing for various reasons. It's
clearly not the answer. A proper, truly competitive market with more
equal bargaining power between markets and the businesses that serve
them would seem to be desirable, but it's hard to see how to cause it
to exist. Striking down laws that promote artificial scarcity
(copyright and patent) would be a start. Most likely, the Internet
will play a key role in enabling the formation of communities to occur
again. Fuel shortages/price increases and climate change might help
too, bad though such things initially seem, as people seek to scrimp
and worry about global warming and so avoid as much car travel, use
buses, and generally meet random people in their neighborhoods and
towns once again as a result. Mass consumer backlashes against ever-
more-expensive and frivolous "lifestyle consumables" like perfumes and
razor blades might be another one, or a steady encroachment of cheap
commodities from below -- commodity computing hardware happened in my
lifetime, and commodity software is on the rise in FOSS; commodity
generic fragrances and cheap razor blades compatible with common
razors can't be far behind. There's lots of room for various companies
to grab the low end of the market from the traditional robber barons
in various industries, and if some of them don't join the dark side
and become part of the same oligopoly they started off by challenging,
we'll see some changes.

But I digress...