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).
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.