It's worth remembering that you can get an expensive puppy too. I.e. choosing proprietary software doesn't mean that time and expertise won't be required.

Recent previous discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26672009 .

Free software was always intended as Libre software or Freedom software, though.

The main concern is autonomy, not economic costs.

I expect you know this already, which is why the puppy analogy sort of fails.

Very fair point, since "free puppy" misses the "free as in freedom" aspect. I think it works better than than "free as in beer", which captures part of the CapEx dimension but none of the OpEx dimension.