You seem to conveniently ignore the very common situation where free software is replacing expensive paid software. If the alternative was to pay commercial license fees then not only does the organisation save money but the taxpayer does too. And lots of other parties who could not afford good software have something to use. I would say that is in fact a very good use of tax.
Depends on how many competing "paid for" software businesses go bust due to it.
Free is great until someone comes along at your work and offers to do your job for free or for much less and your chased out.
Been on the end of it myself when a contractor offered to do my job for a lot less and I lost my job.
Its a bitter pill to swallow.
But I guess all is fair in business and in war.
The hard-line capitalist take on this is that you weren't good enough at delivering value.
Which usually is bullshit, if you look longer than the next three-month reporting cycle; also less true than the fact that contractors are more often than not chosen for the non-committal nature of relation to the customer, wherein it is promised that a swift termination is possible. (this is probably more relevant in countries that have some employee protection in place; where the employer can't fire at will.)
Now, contractors usually trust corporate inertia to propel them through this, also relying on "if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem" as a mechanism to sustain income. Both factors effectively result in them losing their competitive edge compared to employees.
None of this is relevant to a discussion market for free PCB CAD software. First of all, the contractor did not offer to replace you for nothing, right?
Looking at the current market, it's not like Autodesk are going out of business, even though we who have suffered from their products might wish that they would. And the competition KiCAD is up against is mostly the simpler versions from megavendors, not any mom-and-pop small software vendor -- because there aren't any. Not anymore.
The big ones offerings, OTOH, have become more and more encumbered as vendors like Autodesk, Adobe, and others effectively are enforcing the "for-hire" model that their license has contained all the time. ("You have a time-limited right to borrow this software and we at any time are allowed to make it stop working, turning your projects into encrypted blobs") This of course thanks to call-home software being practical now that anything is networked all the time.
We got in to those relations in the epoch where software was bought shrink-wrapped, when it at most was about not losing the hardware copy-protection dongle to be able to run the product. It felt OK at that time. (
No, not really, I hated it.) Now, with call-home, the tables have turned, and convenience and perceived short-run productivity gains have put a lot of people in very unhealthy relations with vendors where the power is most unevenly distributed.
Free/Libre software is a very much needed counterweight to this, giving the users control over their work flow, and protecting their intellectual property from hostage situations. It also makes a clear case for competence vs resources, at least in the design phase; it's not about what resources you've got, it's what you know, your experience and competence that makes all the difference.