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Proprietary software is still hugely dominant in all markets, even though it has a significant cost. Oracle in fact charges extreme fees, but many people pay them instead of using cheap open source knockoffs from Europe like MySQL because Oracle is far and away a better product. Nor is Oracle planning on giving their advantages away for free, they wouldn’t be in the position they’re in if they ever had.

MySQL is not an "Oracle knockoff". The OSS database system that comes far closer to Oracle is PostgreSQL and, yes, Oracle is better. MySQL's aim has traditionally been low-to-medium load systems that require fast read times more than fast write times (i.e. read operations far outnumber write operations)--often at the expense of integrity and constraints (my biggest beef with it; I want foreign constraints, for example, enforced by default, I don't want to have to switch storage engines to do it). Oracle's target demographic is much larger systems with far more expansive needs. Hence the need for "Oracle DBAs" who are pretty expensive in their own right: Oracle is a non-trivial system to set up and maintain at its peak efficiency.

Nor is Oracle planning on giving their advantages away for free, they wouldn’t be in the position they’re in if they ever had.

Most companies that benefit from OSS do so by releasing their changes to the underlying system (i.e. the kernel, system libraries, miscellaneous general use libraries, etc.) and selling some closed source package, like Oracle, Google (well, they're not really selling a closed source package, but the software running the search engine, GMail and friends remains closed source), Apple, or VMWare. The only kinds of people who are bothered by this are the Richard Stallmans of the world and they, while vocal, are a minority of those who use and write OSS.