In most places that I have been, free software is basically the way to not pay for software, for most companies free === gratis.

In the 1980's and 1990's, the same kind of places would be pirating software.

In Portugal, we used to have shops with catalogs during those days, hardly anyone at goverment level cared about software sales, nowadays it is controlled by an economic agency and those kind of shops aren't as easy to find as they were up to early 2000's.

Free software allows them to now be in a legal state, yet the authors get the same as before most of the time, nothing.

Which is why in the end many FOSS projects end up pivoting for something commercial, preferbly in ways where even piracy isn't possible, like SaaS.