>I honestly do not mean any offence, just out of curiosity.
>If you guys care about money and time why would you spend the best years of your life basically copying commercial products for free?
1) For the same reasons commercial vendors build competing products: different tools in the same category fit different scenarios
2) The right-tool-for-the-job concept: Sometimes a commercial solution is the right choice, sometime an open-source solution is. Budgets, applicability, and local expertise all should factor into platform selection decision.
3) Because sometimes the output of a platform is more important than the platform itself: If your role is to work with data, not to produce software, it can in the end be more efficient in the end to have a platform you can modify as needed.