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Developing an Open Source software can have some incentives to have cleaner code. Talking from personal experience. Here are my though on it: First, with Open Source software, you expose (potentially) what you write to the while world, as a consequence, you don't want to feel ridiculous by publishing atrociously bad code. In contrast, in a corporate environment, the code is not seen by so many eyes if at all, and even if read, the readers are roughly a known quantity. Second, You have far more time/freedom, specially if it's a personal project, to think about design/code architecture, and to rework things if required.
You can also spend time on things like unit tests, fuzzing, etc.
Basically, you can more easily work on all these things that are "valuable" but difficult to "quantify/measure". Third, people working on OSS projects are generally a bit more motivated, either because it's their subject of interest, or because of the general appeal of OSS. Forth, often with OSS, you actually have more resources/service available to help with code quality. CI, static analysis, dependency auditing, etc is one click/integration away.
In a Corporate environment, the procurement for such services can be off-putting, integration setup can be an up-hill battle, and there can be strong restrictions regarding external services. Just as an example, in a previous job, I tried to get budget for a Jenkins server, never got it, so I ended-up "stealing" an old abandoned server from another project, once I got it I ran into issues not being able to configure the post commit hooks to trigger a CI build. Heck, in this job, even my home desktop was a 3 or 4 times better development machine than my work laptop. Things are changing slowly, having a good code coverage is more and more a goal if not a company policy, code review processes are more and more common, companies are a bit less paranoid about trusting external services for CI/analysis/fuzzing. But from what I have been able to see in most of my job, proprietary code bases tend to be lower quality than most OSS projects. Even the code I've produced in my free time tend to be better than the code I've written at my job. It's not an absolute however, you can still have terrible OSS code bases, it's just you are a bit more geared towards better code quality in OSS projects. |