vote up 6 vote down star

As I wrote the title to this question, I reworded it a handful of times because I'm hoping to get good, well thought out feedback from the community. Not just "off the cuff" answers of emotion.

Over the span of my career, I've been witness to, and a part of, many situations where there was a need for a particular software tool. However, the people involved were only looking for "free" solutions. Even though there were well know, well respected, and highly polished tools right in front of them (metaphorically speaking). The single con that these solutions had was that they had a price tag. Maybe $9. Maybe $9000. (usually on the low end of that scale)

So, "Why are developers generally opposed to purchasing software tools?".


Addition

I should clarify that this question is not asking anything about FOSS. Assume that the tool that is needed does not have any FOSS solution available. Also assume that we're talking about products for less than $100 as these are the tools that seem to have the most resistance. Things like VS tend to be easier to justify or not because a business is usually making the purchase. Where for the sub $100 tools, it's an individual developer.
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Why does this belong on SuperUser and not StackOverflow? – John Saunders Jul 19 at 23:32
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because it's not a programming question. – levi rosol Jul 19 at 23:35
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But it is about developers. If you can't ask about the behaviour of developers on a programming site, then what is next? No question about compilers because it's not about code? – Lasse V. Karlsen Jul 19 at 23:39
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It should have been left on StackOverflow. There are some people who hate any question that isn't completely technical or doesn't matter to their programming niche, your's is obviously programming related. – Lance Roberts Jul 20 at 0:05
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so are you suggesting that this question should be closed and re-asked on StackOverFlow? I did put thought to where i should post this prior to posting my question, and due to seeing posts at SO get shut down with the "not a programming question, read the FAQ" so often, i opted to ask it here. Also, both sites say no subjective questions, however, SU seems to be more open to questions like this than SO. also why i posted it here. complaining about where this question should be really seems to be irrelevant IMO. You even provided what i considered good feedback. – levi rosol Jul 20 at 0:57
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migrated to stackoverflow.com by Jeff Atwood♦ Jul 20 at 8:33
This question is software development or programming related, and is a better fit for Stack Overflow.