[EthanHeilman]

Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not.

I think the correlation if it exists is pretty weak. Plenty of good software produced for free. For example linux is still generally "free as in beer" and I at least prefer it to windows. Plenty of bad software produced as a profit motivated venture. I am not going to provide an example of "bad software" to avoid a distracting flame war, but I'm sure everyone can come up with examples.

It is an interesting subject and hopefully someone has done a nice analysis of it, my non-scientific and highly biased assessment is that hobbyist software (read "free as in beer") tends to be higher quality from a technical standpoint but lower quality from a UX standpoint (read UX as friendly to a non-software engineering audience). Whereas the reverse is true with business produced software (UX over technical). Ubuntu managed to marry both worlds and produce noob friendly linux but this is often harder than it looks.