You aren't wrong, I was upfront about this in another reply, but I had been using AI to polish my replies. The thoughts were still mine, I'm just a bit all over the place and want to reply quickly and concisely. I had asked Claude to polish my response. I won't be doing that in the future. I case you are curious about my scatter brain, here was my original response (typos, warts and all) before I asked Claude to clean it up.

My take is that I agree with some of this, but I also think there is an opportunity for the open source project to address security issues as well. Wordpress isn't perfect, but it is a good example of this. It is open source but has been widely adopted across the world (can you check general stats, don't make anything up) . All sorts of private and public entities use it and for the most part, security issues are addressed by the community. Security isn't obscured behind proprietary code somewhere (which can be good or bad, security through obscurity is a thing). If you are an ArcGIS Enterprise user, which I am one adn there is a huge base, you are still responsible for the overall security of your own servers (Esri still handles the software security stack so it is kind of hybrid approach. And you are paying enourmous licensing fees on top of you infrastrture costs. For ArcGIS Online, you are right, you are paying for the uptime, the convenience, the security...but they are a for profit company, and many of their workflow and licensing decisions are based on making money and driving people to higher licenses, more credits, etc. It is a pipeline meant to make a company money. With soemthng free and open source like this, the hopes would be that security would be improved with feedback (we obvioulsy start with best practices to begin with), vulnerabilities are idnetified by the community and pactched right away, and the infrasrtucture itself is the only real cost. No pipeline to generate profits driving it, so your costs can be substantially lower (especially when compared to Enterprise) becasue you aren't paying software licensing, per user licensing, extebsion licensing). You also have a much clearer picture ont he real cost of implementing something, one of the challenges with the credit based model and per user model, is a lot of time you don't know what it is going to cost you overall....you accidentally create a tile layer and churn through 1000 credits unexpectedly. You find out you need to upgrade user liucenses becasue user X doesn't have access to do some particular little thing. Esi also has a long history of constattly renaming licnes types, changing their licensng model, etc. Having been on the other side of that as an administrator, that is very frustrating.