> Perhaps one reason is that OSS system programmers are washing their dirty linen in public; not a matter of "many eyes make bugs shallow", but that "any eyes make bad code embarassing".
There's something to it. Anecdote of one: at one time management threatened^Wannounced that they planned to open the code base. I for one was not comfortable with that. In a commercial setting, I code with time to release in mind. No frills, no optimizations, no additional checks unless explicitly requested. I just wrote too much code which was never released (customer/sales team changed its mind). And time to market was typically of utmost importance. If the product turns out to be viable, one can fix the code later (which late in my career I spent most time on).
There's something to it. Anecdote of one: at one time management threatened^Wannounced that they planned to open the code base. I for one was not comfortable with that. In a commercial setting, I code with time to release in mind. No frills, no optimizations, no additional checks unless explicitly requested. I just wrote too much code which was never released (customer/sales team changed its mind). And time to market was typically of utmost importance. If the product turns out to be viable, one can fix the code later (which late in my career I spent most time on).