Honest question - do you think if the proprietary software you worked on had been planned from the beginning to be released publicly, a very large outlay would be unnecessary?
Not him, but if I were writing something that was going to be publicly released then I could imagine the team would:
a) Have to include a lot more documentation
b) Be a lot more paranoid about best practices, and writing generalizable code even if it doesn't fit their particular slice of the market
c) Never have the chance to use a closed source solution for part of the problem (e.g. no we can't have half our app actually be a series of Oracle specific stored procedures, or buy a UI package for $20,000 rather than use a heavily modified version of Bootstrap).
Not at all - if it were part of the strategy from the outset, different decisions would be made along the way. I wasn't trying to say that it's necessarily harder to build software for public release, just that it's hard to publicly release software that was not built that way. But I guess I don't really know for sure - I've never worked on a project like that.
a) Have to include a lot more documentation
b) Be a lot more paranoid about best practices, and writing generalizable code even if it doesn't fit their particular slice of the market
c) Never have the chance to use a closed source solution for part of the problem (e.g. no we can't have half our app actually be a series of Oracle specific stored procedures, or buy a UI package for $20,000 rather than use a heavily modified version of Bootstrap).