Having run four commercial software companies I know where the bodies are buried. Big ticket closed commercial software for on-selling is never clean. It will be bench tested and some qa testing, never enough though. Ever wonder why support is a revenue item and the money goes to the bottom line and not used to clean the code? Also closed custom code written for your own use does come out much better as you are eating your own cooking. There is the problem though is that many CIO's are not knowledgable in the area of static analysis and inspections and hence do not take advantage of them. So by default Open Source achieves quicker reliablity due to the lack of speed on new releases on versions of commercial code. Of course there are thousands of examples where this is not the case but then its the concept of speed of bug detection as quick as possible due to Quality Assurance rather than after the fact with Quality Control
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Having run four commercial software companies I know where the bodies are buried. Big ticket closed commercial software for on-selling is never clean. It will be bench tested and some qa testing, never enough though. Ever wonder why support is a revenue item and the money goes to the bottom line and not used to clean the code? Also closed custom code written for your own use does come out much better as you are eating your own cooking. There is the problem though is that many CIO's are not knowledgable in the area of static analysis and inspections and hence do not take advantage of them. So by default Open Source achieves quicker reliablity due to the lack of speed on new releases on versions of commercial code. Of course there are thousands of examples where this is not the case but then its the concept of speed of bug detection as quick as possible due to Quality Assurance rather than after the fact with Quality Control