I didn't inherit them, but I've had to read through portions of the sqlite and Mercurial codebases and found both to be very well written. Good code can and doe

I didn't inherit them, but I've had to read through portions of the sqlite and Mercurial codebases and found both to be very well written. Good code can and does exist. It rarely exists in the private closed source sector, however, because teams either are unwilling to invest in it, lack the proper skills in their developers, or both.