I’m not suggesting grandpa reads code, contributors do. We all know that most commercial code is much shittier than open source. Sure, commercial code usually covers more edge cases and has better UX, but is cobbled together from legacy and random product asks.
More users != more contributors. As software gets more popular, you begin getting 10, 100, 1000, 1,000,000 users for every contributor.
This doesn't just affect non-programmers. We can't even police NPM.
People want it to be true so that it will be a talking point, but it's not true, and we need to find new talking points that align with facts that are evident outside the echo chambers.
Plenty of examples I've heard about but haven't actually used myself so I can't confidently assert the quality of the software. But Windows ME, Norton, and McAfee, I have personal experience with.
Oh, and also Windows Vista.
Plenty of badly-written open source software, too; won't argue against that. But one of the biggest reasons, for me at least, why I prefer to use open-source software rather than commercial if I have a choice is bug fixes. I've reported over a dozen bugs against open-source software I use over the years; most of them have been fixed (in a couple cases I was able to fix it myself). I've rarely even been able to report a bug against closed-source software, let alone get those bugs fixed. So even if if were true that commercial software as a whole has similar or better quality than open-source, my personal experience is the other way around: open-source quality gets better over time while the closed-source software that I have to use (lacking open-source alternatives) doesn't improve the same way.
Windows ME, Windows Vista, Internet Explorer, Adobe PDF Reader, Siemens Step7, Norton, McAffe, the list goes on. If you look at it as a function of terribleness * users then corporate ware takes the cake. There are loads of terrible open projects but nobody uses them.
I would argue most code of any license is not actually regularly audited if at all, and certainly nowhere near the levels people seem to think they are.
> We all know that most commercial code is much shittier than open source
> I would argue most code of any license is not actually regularly audited if at all, and certainly nowhere near the levels people seem to think they are.
Every device should run OpenBSD. And only the audited part.
