> The paradox is that the OSS writer cares and is often willing to fix code she writes for free, more than the other paid work she does. I feel like the parado

> The paradox is that the OSS writer cares and is often willing to fix code she writes for free, more than the other paid work she does. I feel like the paradox of this claim is that paid work seems to be collectively far higher quality software than personal OSS projects. This claim is my opinion, I’m not stating it as fact, and I can certainly think of specific cases of very high quality OSS and very low quality commercial software. That said, in my experience both personal and witnessing others, the sum total open source software has a worse user experience precisely because it’s not catering to what other people need, while paid work might seem less cared for but actually does take care of all the boring chores that need to be done to make software great. Things like good documentation, good unit and end-to-end tests, and polished interfaces, just to name a few. Even just building a GUI is probably eschewed more often by OSS projects because it takes loads more work than making a functional CLI. All these things tend to get skipped more often when you’re writing software for yourself, it certainly has been true for me as well as other people I know. It certainly seems true if you pick random projects to read through on github or npm or whatever, most of it seems like it was a passion project for a month or so before getting abandoned.