The good thing of open source is that people pick the best available, or at least some that is "good enough" when there are many choices.
The bad thing of proprietary code is that you paid for that, so you are stuck with it. Throwing it again and redoing it has a high cost, staying with it has a (high?) cost. But if you want custom code or very specific code, it's going to be one-off.
So yes, in general you can say that open source has better quality, because the best rise to the top, while in proprietary code it is what it is.
I believe that you could easily turn around the argument:
To stay relevant with paid software you have to make something people will be willing to buy. If you produce bad software, people will not or at least stop buying it.
You can dump everything into the open source domain without any restrictions.
Therefore, commercial code is of better quality.
It's not that I believe this, I find neither of those convincing. There is great open source software and there is great commercial software. There is a huge amount of bad software on both seids either.
Is good open source software better than good proprietary software? Depends on what are the criteria for good, but I don't think that's something we could state as general as "open source is better."
Going back to the original article:
The distinction the article talks about seems to be personal motivation to make the code better. While there might be a shift to be more engaged in a personal project (which is likely) the licensing model of that personal project is fairly irrelevant for this.
Futher, quite a lot of people are also engaged in their job and care about the product they are working on.
Are people that don't care about it on their job more or less likely to even start personal projects? To contribute to open source? I don't know, maybe there is some data on that.
> To stay relevant with paid software you have to make something people will be willing to buy.
This doesn't mean it has to be good, just that you convince people to pay you, which is IMHO "easy" with the high software developer demand right now and difficulty for non-devs to distinguish between high and low quality software.
I think though, that as you are saying, open source shines with generic libraries where there's competition and selection of the best, while proprietary software shines with end-products (which are normally a multi-discipline team effort).
> The good thing of open source is that people pick the best available
At least at the fringes, popularity can be anticorrelated with quality.
I can't count the number of times I've looked for a library to do some task, found an extremely popular repo with thousands of stars, tried it and had it fail in an obvious way, find that the bug was reported already (and ignored or closed or a pr was opened and ignored).
I then try some alternative, built by an unknown author, and find that it has reasonable tests (!) and good docs (!) and actually works. 12 GitHub stars.
That is exactly what I mean. So you used the best available one! And so will many people. The case you are describing normally happens when the previous one has been there for a while, and the new one is, well, new.
Many people will do like you, and find the new one more useful, and add their stars, and write articles, so over time it'll also become popular.
And this is generally true; for similarly age libraries, the one with better quality (accounting for docs as well!) is normally more popular. There are exceptions for sure, as recently popular dev's libraries become more popular because of how popular their author is, but I'd say in libraries that are 3-5+ years old this generally holds true
The good thing of open source is that people pick the best available, or at least some that is "good enough" when there are many choices.
The bad thing of proprietary code is that you paid for that, so you are stuck with it. Throwing it again and redoing it has a high cost, staying with it has a (high?) cost. But if you want custom code or very specific code, it's going to be one-off.
So yes, in general you can say that open source has better quality, because the best rise to the top, while in proprietary code it is what it is.