Why are so many Open Source companies using closed source tools and services for building Open Source?

From Operating Systems to Email to Source Control, Open Source proponents often use proprietary software to build Free Open Source Software.

Hell, even most of the cool kids of freedom nowadays post their posts here on Medium, a closed publishing platform.

Companies that have started with their own email setups, bug trackers and chat servers and so on are turning to hosted services like Jira, Trello, Slack and Google Apps when they grow up. All of this leads to them outsourcing the very tools they use to communicate and organise work within their company.

On the desktop the number of web developers using OS X and Windows in dominant numbers, and from those a large chunk use Adobe Products for image editing and PowerPoint or Keynote for presentations. For development tools Sublime Text and JetBrains IDEs (PHPStorm, etc.) have grown in popularity over the last few years.

For all of the options there are open options available, but yet it seems that in the daily grind the value of “freedom” diminishes when proprietary products offer a better overall experience. Tweaking and tuning a free product compared to purchasing a license or subscription to a service is just more convenient — and potentially cheaper.

Sure enough services are a different game from software, but it’s still somewhat weird that despite all the “Open Source won” hubbub, proprietary software and services are doing pretty well for themselves. And a large chunk of that money comes from a crowd whose business is around free software.

This often leaves the purveyors of Open Source software vendor locked into an ecosystem of apps and services — The very thing they use as an argument when selling their own services and software. This creates an interesting conflict between values of Open Source creators and promoters as is noted in the article Free Software Needs Free Tools:

First, the use of nonfree tools sends an unacceptable message to users of the free software produced. “Software freedom is important for you as users,” developers seem to say, “but not for us.” Such behavior undermines the basic effectiveness of the strong ethical commitment at the heart of the free software movement.

Is it just because closed products by nature create better user experiences, where as Open Source is best at low level things that are a commodity?