I feel like a "freetard" "greybeard" "basement-dweller" (insert-your-own-pejorative-here) saying this, but: yet another reason why I will never ever base my livelihood on a closed ecosystem. Open source is certainly not a panacea, but needing to do something like this is just ridiculous.
As the former opposite of the freetard and greybeard, a mere corporate VB peon, you are 100% spot on.
Most of the commercial software dev stuff is like regularly salting and sandpapering your genitals. And I'm not talking about fine grit paper either. Even relatively popular fields like .Net are painful on a daily basis.
I really like to see inside the black boxes when they inevitably go wrong. Hell getting a backtrace out of a dump file on windows from commercial software is an art in itself for example.
I had the fortune of inheriting a Sun SparcStation 20 in 1999 that was being thrown out. That and NetBSD literally drove a spike through my mind and entirely destroyed my conception of proprietary closed source software. I really wouldn't touch it now but the money sorting out all the shitty little problems is pretty good, even if it tries to stab you in the face 5 times a day. There's lots of work as well unlike my preferred field of Unix and C.
So I agree with you but I'm a slut for cash and unreliable black boxes of software is good money even if it does feel like I'm the IT equivalent of a STD ridden stripper.
The point of free software is you can do what you want with it, including fixing it if needs be. I believe Stallman started the movement from frustration that he couldn't fix a problem in some software he used.
