[mattbrewsbytes]

I'm going to use an analogy from my hobby: because internal software is like shop furniture in a woodworking shop. Those things are mostly used in the production of other things that make the company revenue. It does its job, has room for many improvements, but isn't something you'd go out and sell as a product. It might be built from scraps, using crappy lumber and pieced together with whatever fasteners were around or cheap.

Open Source tooling on the other hand is like independent woodworker sharing plans with their community. They want it to be the best they can produce because they know their peers are going to see it, possibly use it, possibly mention it to others if its really good.

[pydry]

There are other reasons too:

* Time pressure - OSS is rarely under deadline pressure so the temptation to half ass it is mitigated.

* Survivorship bias - there's actually a lot of OSS shit out there too but it is much easier to ignore coz nobody is gonna force you to use it.

[P_I_Staker]

Similar to your survivorship bias, just because something is done for free doesn't mean it's an insignificant "nothing" project, and just because you sell something doesn't mean much effort was put into it.

You could be comparing the work of hundreds of dedicated engineers for over a decade to something someone threw together in an afternoon, that was never intended for mainstream use... sure they're charging $20k for it, but that doesn't make it "good".