Why OSS is higher quality software than proprietary

Open source software and proprietary software have been duking it out in the public arena for many years now…observe the competition between Linux and Windows, Firefox and Internet Explorer, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office. Many people consider open source software products to be higher quality than their closed source counterparts. The definition of “higher quality” is certainly broad and can mean many different things (quality of user experience, code quality, software stability, security, performance, etc), but I think that many open source products come out on top in many of these measures. Why?

I believe that the difference is in the intentions and motivation behind the creation of these products. The actual act of creating all software comes down to architects, developers and testers. In a closed source corporate setting, many of these people are doing their job because they’ve been told to, not because they believe in what they’re creating or because they have a personal stake in creating the best software they can. In open source, everyone who’s working on the product are doing so because they want to.

When people want to put the effort into doing something, they will do their best. When they’re told to do something, they won’t. The difference between open source and proprietary software is basic human nature.

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  • http://benatkin.com/ Ben Atkin

    Thank you for not making a simple love vs. money argument that many who have tackled the subject make. I think it’s hard to commission creative works and get a top-quality product. As has been seen time and time again in proprietary software, it’s easier to see what rises to the top and buy that. Examples include PowerPoint (Microsoft), Flickr (Yahoo!), YouTube (Google), and Writely (Google).

    I think the reason there’s a lot of high-quality Open Source projects is that there are so many of them, and that there’s generally no reason to keep an open source project alive if the code isn’t any good.

  • http://benatkin.com/ Ben Atkin

    Thank you for not making a simple love vs. money argument that many who have tackled the subject make. I think it’s hard to commission creative works and get a top-quality product. As has been seen time and time again in proprietary software, it’s easier to see what rises to the top and buy that. Examples include PowerPoint (Microsoft), Flickr (Yahoo!), YouTube (Google), and Writely (Google).

    I think the reason there’s a lot of high-quality Open Source projects is that there are so many of them, and that there’s generally no reason to keep an open source project alive if the code isn’t any good.

  • Matthew Petro

    Thanks for commenting! You definitely bring up another point I hadn’t considered…the evolutionary nature of open source development. Bad projects become abandoned fairly quickly, because there’s no impetus for developers to keep working. This is the opposite of proprietary development, where companies will often spend huge amounts of resources to keep failing or low quality projects alive. Yet another reason open source tends to be better software.

  • Matthew Petro

    Thanks for commenting! You definitely bring up another point I hadn’t considered…the evolutionary nature of open source development. Bad projects become abandoned fairly quickly, because there’s no impetus for developers to keep working. This is the opposite of proprietary development, where companies will often spend huge amounts of resources to keep failing or low quality projects alive. Yet another reason open source tends to be better software.