A showy difference between proprietary software bundles and free/opensource projects is specialization: While a proprietary project pretends to offer all solutions to all supposed needings (to you don’t look for alternatives), FOSS applications are often specialized, that is, they focus on founding goals to to fulfill them well, and they often put aside accessory functions that other existing applications perform better.
No fear to a supposed “competition” to really complementary applications, and there is good understanding when neutral protocols and formats are used.
Some examples:
| Proprietary | Free / FOSS |
| Microsoft Office | LibreOffice |
| aTalk | |
| Google Chrome | M. Firefox |
| Adobe Photoshop | GIMP |
| Microsoft Exchange | Dovecot, Postfix, DAViCal |
| Google Docs | Nextcloud |
| Windows | Debian |
Some formats and protocol examples:
| Excluding | Neutral |
| Microsoft doc, docx, xls | OpenDocument |
| Adobe Illustrator .AI | SVG |
| HEVC / h.265 | WebM / VP9 |
| Adobe / Macromedia Flash | HTML, CSS, JavaScript |
| Telegram | XMPP / Jabber |
| AcivityPub / Fediverse | |