Why use proprietary (less tested, less stable) solutions while there is community-tested and community-supported ones? ^_^ People still stuck with a stereotype that most brilliant programmers work for corporations. This is, obviously, not true. Most of corporations outsource their R&D and QA and spend for marketing instead. That is a very common strategy. Now tell me - how this strategy correlates with a quality of a…
> One cannot compete with Linux (Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS) communities in matters of testing and code quality. No code is better tested than those included in mainstream kernel or a polular distribution. I know I'm feeding the troll here, but that is just naive. There are many great open-source projects with terrific code quality, like parts of (and certainly not the whole of) the Linux kernel. There are also many commerci…
Yes, there are many this or that, but in general, Open Source model works just because it is community driven. That means if your project or some critical part of it (scheduler or implementation of TCP) is really important to users it will receive almost constant code reviews ans quality improvements. This was the story behind nginx, openssh and thousands more.
Of course, some parts of project might be considered less relevant and users are satisfied with code that just works.
One can achieve better code quality than fanatics, nerds or very experienced programmers could show only by hiring such people for doing what they like to do. Mediocre wage-workers can't produce anything near it. Look at nginx's or openbsd's or postfix sources.
Please, try to imagine number of installations of both products. mySQL runs on almost every crappy hosting in the world. And on Facebook. ^_^
I don't way to say that mySQL is great product. What I want to say is that it is good enough and stable enough. Otherwise there will be no usage of it.
btw, outsourcing is all about cost reduction, not quality increase. ^_^