That sounds an awful lot like, to you, that is the "very big financial cost difference" I mentioned.

That factors into financial incentives, doesn't it?

There are also products that still have licensing costs even when you self host.

I've worked at a large company that self-hosted Atlassian products that were a big part of a full-time team's job.

I've worked at a large company that built virtually all their internal tooling in house.

I've worked at a large company that used cloud-based vendors.

They all had tradeoffs.

One of those companies even forced a migration from cloud based CI to internal CI for cost reasons then stopped us halfway through because they couldn't scale up our hosted CI to keep up fast enough.

I could argue your answer is just as short-term thinking when your critical tools end up costing you more hardware, data center, and salary opex than you planned for (which I have seen).

For me it's just a question of where I would want to invest my org's time.

For example: how much time do I want us to spend looking after a task/ticketing system? About zero. How much time do I want my org to invest in DR planning for our self-hosted wiki? About zero.

So unless there's a convincing difference (cost, features, etc), cloud-hosted SaaS would be my choice there.

The answers also probably change a lot based on how the company operates. Would I have been comfortable with a self-hosted wiki when I worked at Facebook and we had a pretty damn good team providing DBs as a service? Yes. Would I have wanted to do the same when I was the sole infra person in my group at another job? No.

Runners? Yes. There are definitely some compute/resource heavy things that are more efficient to self host. Until you run out of capacity and getting more capacity involves something like having go buy more hardware and data center space (which I've had to do, though not for CI reasons specifically).

GPU-heavy tasks were also heavily in favor of buying hardware and self-hosting at the time I was making purchasing decisions at my job.

Not everything falls in that bucket and the examples in my comment don't (GitHub isn't just runners).

Edit: I'll also add a question: what part of "unless there's a very big financial cost difference that more than offsets my time and hardware investment" did you think would not cover "have you checked the cost of GitHub runners?"

I'm not going to spend time trying to fix problems I don't have.

Obviously if your constraints are different, do what works for you.

So you are saying that because people are being screwed in the current market that is undeniable proof that people are OK with being screwed by the market?

If I misunderstand you please correct me.

If that is what you contend, then you have no addressed whether or not the market allows them to do otherwise. You take for granted that the market is free and that people are willingly choosing this outcome with perfect knowledge and without any incentives or forces which would compel them to act despite not wanting to be screwed. For instance, if you do not have bargaining power with a company over your contract, you have no choice but to accept it. Can you enter into negotiations before agreeing to a EULA?

There are forces that are not free market forces which constrain actions, there is human tendency to prioritize immediate needs over long term benefits, etc which all play a role.

The fact that:

1. The market exists 2. We have a conception of how the market should work in an ideal 3. People act in a certain way

do not all combine to make it true that 'people prefer it this way'.

That's the point I am making in counter to your assertion.

> and the premise that there is enough information flow that, if people cared, they would

That's a terrible premise. Why are you assuming that this flow exists and that billions of people are failing individually rather than the simpler one this flow not existing?