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In order to have good source quality and well functioning software you need the following:
- good specifications as you can write clean code only with purpose
- good professionals who write the code, in best case professionals who are not only good but have experience in the given field
This means you can end up with good or bad quality source and/or software in any of these worlds quite easily.
EDIT: If you work with large codebases and/or code that does something non-trivial then you will need support for the libraries you have used in case of serious projects. For this you will often have to pay in both arenas. An interesting thing is that even some proprietary software have licensing schemes that provide the source for you.
modified 19-Aug-14 8:54am.
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Because I cannot inspect Proprietory Software (by definition), I simply don't know.
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For infrequent tasks, especially one-off tasks, open source's price wins every time - and often open source has most of the features of any closed-source equivalent.
For more frequent tasks, it comes down to the individual piece of software. Eclipse, for example, vs Visual Studio or XCode (or, frankly, notepad!) is a no-brainer for me - it's too complex and unstable to be viable.
For everyday tasks, though, I tend to prefer closed-source - and it hadn't occurred to me until responding here that the reason for this is more to do with the frequency of updates than anything else.
Give me stable software with the occasional bug fix over software that adds a new feature every five minutes.
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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I think you defined it! or at least gave me some insight into bending my thinking on the subject.
Well put, and the thinking makes sense to me. In fact, I think you just gave me a new sales pitch for my software versus the open source version.
People use my programs all day long for business.
Thanks
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...would have been, "When is OS software a viable option?"
OS software is often amazing, extremely powerful, and even cost-effective...but it isn't for everyone, or every situation, and in many cases the technical aspects don't have much impact on a business decision.
Just this last week I was presented several problems open source could have solved, but in the context of an environment with an enormous legacy dependency on MS Office the proprietary MS brand carries the weight of business acceptance. Too often we in the community overlook that the ultimate decider of what technology comes into play is almost always user preference, user comfort, and user wants. In essence then it becomes irrelevant if OS is better or not, because it is simply not a viable business decision in some arenas.
That said, the comments here on this survey are some of the best I've read of late. It shows the maturity of our field to have people recognizing that free doesn't mean inherently better or worse.
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It's cool when "oh and look it's free!"
But there is no way I am going to release mine for free no matter what the others do.
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"Free software" doesn't stands for "no cost", but for the source code is available and can be modificable.
A good lecture is the book "Free for all" that talks about the philosophy behind the Open Software http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_for_all.peter_wayner/portrait.pdf[^]
The final user doesn't care about the software itself, the users care about a service as a final product. The bills becomes of such service. E.g. the most of IT professionals (consultants) charges for develop software (that is a service) and maintenance software (that is a service)
Actually you can make Open Source Software and charge for that. The issue is that the most of companies and people don't found a way to combine both, free code and earn money.
modified 20-Aug-14 19:00pm.
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Proprietary software is often designed to work with specific file formats, specific products from the same company, or "featured partners". It is often written in a monolithic way, tailored to a specific business environment. Data export options may be limited or nonexistent. It is often Windows Only.
Open source stuff sometimes suffers from the same lack of versatility because it is poorly funded. However, there are numerous examples of open source programs that support tons of file formats, that have highly generic and flexible internal designs, and that are multi-platform. I think this is more likely in the open source world because there is no incentive to act anti-competitively or to favor one company's products over another.
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I voted "no" as it is my response in most cases to OS software.
I would lie if I say that all OS is bad and all paid is good. But if there is no money involved there is little interest to keep high standard. Be it stability, customer support or features.
In my case of OS experience, it was not that you CAN fix bugs yourself - it was that you MUST do it because both the license and dev's point of view was "AS IS" meaning "we don't care" 
With all above said, I know some very good OS software that is on par with commercial ones, but their are like beautiful small islands on the ocean of OS crap. 
--
"My software never has bugs. It just develops random features."
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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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