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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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I (partially) disagree. Fundamentally, my belief is that someone who gets paid to do the work is more rigorous doing the work than someone who does it on a volunteer basis, a human nature thing. Granted, I'm speaking very generally, and what I stated is not always true, but still.
Also, corporations that write close source programs are much more legally adverse to being sued if their product fails (there's a reason why we're seeing so many corporations slapping in arbitration clauses into their agreements these days; risk-averse).
Open source projects tend to just be more careful about their code base not being tainted, and write in disclaimers ("As-is") to protect themselves legally for the failure of the product scenario, and call it a day (again, very generally speaking (I use Fedora specifically for a reason)).
And speaking of Fedora, I do agree with your point that some open source projects are actually done by paid coders. I just believe that's more of the outlier, than the norm, though. Some of that work is done by corporate employees, but still on a volunteer basis.
Not dismissing at all, I am thankful for corporations that actually spend time letting their employees do open source work, even if it's just for their own direct benefit, as it also benefits everyone else.
Having worked with closed source, whatever they project externally, internally they are generally lazy and do the bare minimum. If there is a security review, it might just be throwing it at something like bdba that just checks dependencies against cve. Maybe a tool like coverity or similar code analysis. That's about as far as a moderately careful closed source so goes. It is exceedingly rare for them to fund folks to endlessly fiddle with the code looking for vulnerabilities, and in my experience actively work to rationalize away bugs if possible, rather than allocating time to chasing root cause and fix.
There may be paragons of good closed source development, but there are certainly bad ones. Same with open source.
I also think most open source broadly is explicitly employee work nowadays. Not just hobbyist, except for certain niches.
Day to day, and with a lazy manager who is not technically knowledgeable, I would agree, and they do existence in corporations.
But if you work for one who knows what they're doing and gets a mandate from their boss to make sure the code doesn't leave the corporation legally exposed, then not so much.
Also special events like Y2K also gets extra scrutiny for legal reasons way up and above the normal level scrutiny thing production code gets.
I've worked it both types throughout my career.
The same argument can be made about open source, some projects are very carefully and festidously managed, and others not so much.
Main difference is with closed source, it's hard to know which sort of situation your are dealing with, and no option for an interested third party to come along and fix a problematic project.