[ccalvert]

One of the things I like about open source is its fecundity. When proprietary software ruled, we went to two or three companies to get most of our tools and libraries. Some were very good, some were terrible. We often had to wait years for features and bug fixes. Some key pieces seemed to never go away even though no one liked them. For instance, IE6.

In the open source world, bug fixes often come much more quickly. If fixes don't appear, we at least have the source and can try to fix it -- though sometimes that's a high bar.

If there is an obvious need for a tool or library, someone implements it and throws it up on GitHub. Sometimes the implementation is great, sometimes it is little more than a starting point for our own solutions. But at least we have the source to act as a starting point.

Quality is important, and open source often encourages good quality, but as the writer points out it does not always do so. Sometimes it acts more like a neural net AI algorithm that keeps failing and failing until one day it succeeds.

What open source does encourage is a rapid iteration as developers all over the world look for solutions to known problems. It's a messy solution, but it works surprisingly well. It also helps spread knowledge of how what the nuts and bolts of good software looks like.