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I love open source and I contribute as much as I can. Nothing gives me more joy than giving back what was freely given. I also have been professionally employed, for 25 years in this field of software development.
Ever hear the adage "You get what you pay for". This concept truly applies to open source software.
It is my belief that open source code should only be used if the user understands the code. Using open source code as a black box is a bad recipe.
OpenSSL and Heartbleed exploit is a real world example of getting what you paid for.
MD5 is another real world example of getting what you paid for.
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Quality is determined by skill, not the paycheck. Heartblead has been discovered because it is NOT proprietary software.
Andy Bantly wrote: should only be used if the user understands the code
That goes for all software, but reality is very different.
A lot of people complaining about "open source", because they can see how bad it is. A lot of this crap simply stays hidden in proprietary software.
Aw, keep in mind, most examples on this site are "open source" - and there's enough people copy/pasting it into their proprietary solutions.
Andy Bantly wrote: "You get what you pay for"
how much contribution to this website? How much for this single post? Does that determine it's worth, yes?
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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I have contributed 8 open source projects to this website and my average article rating is near 5. I have been a member since near the beginning. My member id is 22.
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Andy Bantly wrote: It is my belief that open source code should only be used if the user understands the code. Using open source code as a black box is a bad recipe.
I couldn't agree more, except by possibly using a larger font.
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OS software sucks as bad, if not more actually, than commercial products / tools, and as I've encountered over and over again (and contributed to the problem as well), OS software lacks documentation, customer support, and usability (both from a programmer's perspective and/or and end-user perspective.) Now, that's not saying that commercial software is any better, it's just the OS is certainly not better. As to the cost argument, it's also irrelevant because by the time I add up all the hours trying to figure out something in, say SQL Server and compare it to the time I spend trying to figure out something in say, Postgres, the cost of that time at my billing rate is in the noise. Same experience with one of those ridiculous Javascript frameworks for web development, which you can use whether you're using OS RoR or (oh, guess what, it's also OS, gee, I wonder why) the ASP.NET stack.
Marc
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Agreed. Not better. OS may not be worse, but surely not better either; it depends on the individual piece of software.
I find in both cases, it's about the usability and documentation. Most (both closed and open) work pretty well for their "normal" use; however, once you stray from that line, how much time and effort does it take to make some OS thing work for your needs? That never seems to come up when discussing cost/benefit.
"It's the new shiny thing! We should all run down that path!"
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I used to use a graphing package (no names, no packdrill). The package was sold from vendor to vendor at least twice during the period that we used it, which made identifying a source of support tricky.
The final straw was when they managed to generate two incompatible versions of the DLL, one of which was used by a competitor. This meant that our customers could not load the integrated communications packages for both systems on a single computer -- and this was perceived to be *our* fault!
The worst part was that we were hardly using any of the advanced facilities and were thus paying for much more software than we needed.
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Open source efforts tend to be small, and that can lead to quick response times for bug fixes and new features.
When it comes to commercial products it seems we automatically think of large shops (Microsoft) with large products (SQL Server) which can lead to very long response times.
But there are also smaller shops with commercial products, that have the same quick (and personal) response times of the open source providers.
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I make eCommerce software, and it's a hard sell against a customer that chooses to go open source which is about 90%
What blows me away is that they choose a package, and a friend or someone says I can customize your features for you, they write a little bit of code, and cut and paste in all other functionality. After a year has gone by, they start buying non-open source modules for it, because the dead line has past. After 2 more years have gone by, and it's still not working or is fully functional, they they can me back.
Normally the programer has moved out of state, or just disappeared, won't return phone calls.
Now the customer is almost out of money, and I have to give them a discount or payment plan.
And this happens over and over every year.
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Either type of code can be good or bad, whether it's open source or proprietary doesn't matter much. The open source versus proprietary thing usually comes down to cost versus licensing.
However, I'll admit that in the real world I've found that open source code is often better maintained than proprietary in-house code (no one wants to be the one to touch that proprietary code written by that junior programmer who is no longer there: touch it and you own it).
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I agree with the first half of your comment but the quality has a wide spectrum on both sides. You can find good quality and maintained code on both sides and the same is true for crappy lava code. In my opinion clean code written for a specific purpose is quite rare in the world for many reasons.
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I answered No because I think there is a place for both types of software. I was a presenter at the Software Development Conference back in the 80's when Robert Stallman presented the idea that software should be free. Presenting that idea to a group of software professionals was pretty radical, but the idea grew into Open Source.
I think the more interesting question is: How many contributors to Open Source do so on a part time basis, but rely on a full time job in software development to keep the wolves at bay? My feeling is that the best contributors to Open Source are, or were, professional developers who got paid for writing software. I further feel that had they not been paid professionals, the quality of Open Source software would be seriously impinged.
I don't think it's an either-or situation. You need the market place for commercial software to create a permissive atmosphere that allows for quality Open Source software to exist. Expecting numerous individuals to support a family based on the largess of donations for "free" software probably isn't a viable concept.
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I use open source software often and I like it for the fact it usually works well and I can modify it if I need to. But, I am a developer, so I don't consider myself a "reference" user.
For business use, it's a whole different story. People need to be trained, support is often next to nonexistent, there's sometimes mysterious bugs we can't know for sure when they are gonna be fixed (but then again, it's also the case for most commercial products), et al. For all those reasons, open source software often ends up costing way more than "traditional" commercial products.
Thanks a lot, and have a nice day.
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Yip, agreed. Thanks for the fact that this one made it possible to answer yes & no. 
Been using MPlayer for many many years, as well as Firebird for DBMS, and the price is right.
When it come to stuff like OCR, open source don't beat the experience of the people making Omnipage and Abbyy. 
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In terms of efficiency, if I buy a software is not to finish it or create unmanageable patched versions or spend time on some trivial issues. Then I PAY for the reliability, security and assistance, therefore I can CLAIM. Also I have never met company's major deficient.
The only advantage of open source is to have "source". What can I do with 1,500,000 lines of code? I already have my own 15,000 !
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
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...most of the people have clicked the "I can mod it" tag!
Favourite line: Throw me to them wolves and close the gate up. I am afraid of what will happen to them wolves - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Open Source is a better model because it forces those who market and create businesses around it to focus on the service that the customer receives.
Innovation can and does occur in both the open source and closed source model of software development. I think many would argue that innovation is occurring more with open source as of late because a lot of the major players out there are focusing on the idea of service.
Customers will always pay up for service and experience.
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When I need to use a component or software, I tend to look at open-source options first. I cannot count the number of times I have either been able to fix a bug myself, or the maintainer has fixed in quickly for me.
I have had a few similar experiences with closed-source software:
The maintainers of StudioTax are amazing. I have found minor bugs and have emailed them on a Sunday and had a response the same day with a patch. This is FREE (as in beer) tax software. I always make a donation -- at least what I would have spent on QuickTax.
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The one and only advantage of open source stems from the very definition.
We have the source.
Disadvantages are huge:
- No responsibility. Apart for a handful of them, nasty bugs are treated with "submit a patch", "do it yourself" etc. Everyone uses SVN, but not everyone understands APR pools.
- Poor quality. Let's face it: your never encounter machine unusable after changing some icons or colors using Windows Control Panel or shell. Not so with Gnome tweak (last example from less than 24 hours) - changing theme to some PPA download rendered the machine unresponsive to Ctrl-Alt-Del. That's Ubuntu Tahr right after update.
Sorry folks, I don't want to use something that does not work (or at least recover !) after two clicks.
- Unfinished business.
I admit, apt-get (since I'm bitching Ubuntu here) was a huge step, but changing the boot priority (and ITEMS, for God's sake !!) is not good. Windows 7 was demoted and position changed, Windows 8 dissapeared completely (and rendered unbootable) etc. etc. etc. Something like this would never happened upgrading from Win7 to Win8.
- Too many configs (continuing). Was it /etc/grub/grub.conf? Or boot.lst? Or ...
Nevermind, I RTFM again. Again meaning "every time". How often BOOT.INI changed? (Ok, BCD semi-replaced it).
- Making software for money makes developers more responsible. Including myself.
When I wrote something for amusement, almost always ended up in some SCM corner, or abandoned. When I billed, the source works even today. And I reply to emails even if project is finished - I simply feel compelled to continue help someone who payed me good money.
%END-OF-BITCHING%
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A thousand times this.
Open Source is clever for the ecosystem of developing software. But as an end user it can really be a horrific nightmare.
And God forbid you get some marketing doofus who sees "Open Source" the same way he sees the word "Cloud" and you end up with nontechnical people demanding their psychotic modifications to a piece of software just because it's possible.
Software needs to be supported day-to-day. For Open Source systems that means you need developers on hand. For commercial systems, that just means you need a "support@" email address and maybe a phone number.
The number of times I've had had to say "I have to go spelunking in the code to see how they did it." is insane.
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Then why in the very first place you download and use the unstable version?
Developers also build a stable version that has a lot of bug fixes too. You should download that, and this way you will next time check all the Yes related items.
Android is way better than iOS. You can easily see the different between both the softwares.
Favourite line: Throw me to them wolves and close the gate up. I am afraid of what will happen to them wolves - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Then why in the very first place you download and use the unstable version?
I'm not sure what do you mean by "unstable version". It's the official release 14.04.1 LTS[^], Trusty Tahr. (Assuming you are talking about my Ubuntu rant). And even so, let me rephrase it:
"Do not f*** with the existing user data". Especially when it's the boot sequence, I'll say.
Android is way better than iOS
Your preference. For me, both of them are awful, since we can call these anything *but* open source. Restricting not only the stores, channels, UI appearance (iOS, and to some point, even droid), but also the APIs? I'm afraid I won't use neither of those shiny things with an API which is inferior to anything; I won't use things that do not have mailslots or named pipes, shared memory, restricts fopen, control processes etc. And if you want viruses, visit Google Store.
What's this, the new NSA? In the name of security let's forbid anything. That indicates me that not only these are not open source, but are bonking real development, too.
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You pointed out something important here. When I think about "usable opensource" I always refer to at most the 0.001% of the content of opensource SCMs out there because most of those SCMs are filled with crap generated by hobbyists without any responsibility (and without any experience in a given field). The rest, the useful content has been generated by professionals with defined purpose and often these professionals are paid to create and maintain that opensource/free stuff as some other people have mentioned it.
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... such as Chromium, SVN, Apache. And Linux itself.
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Any third party software you use needs care and feeding. When you purchase it from somebody else, support is their problem (at a relatively small cost to you). When you get it for free, support and maintenance are your problem.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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