Ask HN: Do companies have better code than the open source community?

Looking at github lately, I'm struck by how much decent code is made by individuals. I've taken it on faith that they know what they are doing, and have created libraries that are close to some nebulous notion of purity or elegance. Generally the code does something in a straightforward manner, like I could extrapolate where the unfinished parts are going (an indicator that it's close to optimum).

Contrast that with corporate code, where it seems more rigorous, more institutional. It's often entrenched in company culture and whatever process the higher ups have deemed important. I've written much of it off as overhyped, over-trusted and over-utilized. Some things work remarkably well for containing the chaos of an ever-changing market and workforce. But others seem archaic and I can't believe that companies depend on the logic equivalents of toaster ovens (that unwieldiness must be a warning sign).

Could my intuition be wrong? Imagine an idea you have, and that instead of having to write every line, you can outsource it. And that process is hierarchical, so you can reach as high as you want to. What kind of power would that give you? What could you learn that would be out of reach to those with fewer resources? If one person can write good code, what happens when hundreds or thousands of people work for years with million-dollar budgets? Could Google or Amazon have code that runs circles around ours, like if map reduce is the low-lying fruit of the big data world, not even worth protecting? Are we locked outside the pearly gates, dealing with tools that can never give us the leverage that companies enjoy? Is an MIT or GPL license a sign that code wasn't good enough to make the cut?

Or maybe the darwinian evolution of the open source world runs circles around the intelligent design of corporate think tanks. Is there any evidence one way or the other?