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Some open source code is shockingly bad and difficult to understand. Some is rather good and a joy to work in (eg: Samba). I'm not sure the open source -ness makes a difference. Perhaps it is just that the successful open source projects that you've heard about or seen have easy to understand code, and that is the reason for their success (sampling bias)?

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That's a good point. Bad code can definitely appear anywhere. I like to think that open source motivates good practices, like abhirakshit said, but I have no statistics to back up that belief.

This would be a very interesting research topic though. If I had more time, I'd attempt it. Anyone else know of such research, or want to try it? ;-)

Although there are open source projects which are quite bad, I still think being open source does motivate one to write better code. Regardless, having tools at your disposal to quickly understand/ document code for yourself and maybe relay your ideas to others can be really helpful.

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