I think one has to be fairly pedantic to hear the open source argument and not realize that some open source projects are better than others. That said, the phi

I think one has to be fairly pedantic to hear the open source argument and not realize that some open source projects are better than others. That said, the philosophy is a bit dated. Good, solid software often comes from having a large user base. With lots of people using a tool, issues get identified quickly and there is more motivation to fix those issues. What can make the open source method so powerful is that it opens the door for numerous people to improve the software. For important projects, like cpython or boost, this often means having significantly more resources than proprietary software. Its not an absolute rule, but it can often play out that way.