Sometime Today, EP cobbled together some glyphs to say:
what made this software technically superior? If the "Free" license that it was distributed under which allowed numerous people around the world to contribute, check, use, debug and send in suggestions was not even in a little way responsible, then what
Umm, sometimes software is technically superior simply because some company put millions of dollars and research into it.
Case in point is the Oracle database. It is way way way superior to any Free Software equivalent in terms of performance, scalability (both vertically and horizontally), robustness and features.
Large organisations often end up choosing MySQL or PostgreSQL over Oracle primarily because of the cost. Small guys choose MySQL or PostgreSQL simply because they don't need anything more. Sure, you can push it to huge limits, but it's when you do that that you start to notice its weaknesses.