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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

My experience as well, most closed source code I have to work with has an objectively worse quality than most open source code I choose to work with. Open source projects usually don't need to compromise quality to meet a deadline. This is critical for infrastructure and middleware, less important for user-facing products (thus it makes sense to develop the former in the open, and the latter under the typical restrictions of commercially developed software).

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I had to work with a lot of open and close source. From my experience there is an equal amount of good and bad code on both sides of the fence. It depends more on the age of the codebase and the respective engineering techniques.

> My experience as well, most closed source code I have to work with has an objectively worse quality than most open source code I choose to work with.

I think this is mostly because

> most [...] code I have to work with has an objectively worse quality than most [...] code I choose to work with.

I think that explains a lot of it in general. There's vast mountains of horribly messy open source code, but most of it will never get any traction unless/until someone cleans it up.

So popular open source code will either be relatively clean and/or have other important qualities that lets people overlook how messy it is.

For proprietary code, on the other hand, we often don't get to pick and choose.

There's more to any apparent difference in the quality of open source code than just deadlines. It's also things like survivor bias. Messy open source codebases don't attract contributors at the same rate.

And deadlines are still a part of open source software development. Most the really widely used projects are heavily supported by corporate patronage, and you'd better believe that those companies are creating deadlines for the people they pay to contribute to those projects based on their own business needs.

For my part, to me it seems that "enterprise vs non-entperise" is a better predictor of code quality than "closed vs open source".

Messy open source projects gets abandoned as author struggle to finish it or does not have time anymore. Messy close source projects continue, because contracts were already signed.

Deadlines are not the only reason for crappy code and projects without them are not necessary shiny examples of beautiful engineering. Whether closed or open, it often takes multiple attempts till you get architecture right.

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