I was listening to a presentation the other day about open source and the advantages and was surprised to not hear the thing I consider one of the most important. The presenter seemed to me much more financially oriented as he centered around the cost savings in using open source. He also listed a number of other advantages, ones we have frequently heard. What he didn't list as an advantage was the inherent high quality in open source. Imagine for a minute that you are a developer and are going to contribute some code to an open source project. The entire time you are developing that code you know that anyone in the world could end up looking at it and you know for sure that there will be a lot of eyes on your work. Any person in that situation is going to develop the absolutely best code s/he can. Then, if anything is wrong with that code, the developer is much more motivated to fix it ASAP as it is their reputation on the line. I have worked at many different software companies, both developing software and managing groups of developers and I've worked in IT doing similar work. In every one of those cases the checked in code was nowhere near the quality that open source projects maintain constantly. Even with peer reviews and agile methodologies, you still don't have the care to produce the perfect snippet that you would when working on open source. This is one of the big reasons open source projects tend to be so much better than commercial products (of course there are exceptions and this doesn't really count the bottom of the open source pool where it is just one guy submitting code to SourceForge). And this, to me, is one of the biggest advantages of open source - the high quality of the projects we get just because of the model.