Suddenly you've opened this up to a much larger population of programmers who have done great work. I doubt the OP is in the position of not having a large eno

Suddenly you've opened this up to a much larger population of programmers who have done great work. I doubt the OP is in the position of not having a large enough pool of people to hire to his satisfaction using his criteria. This does not mean that there are no closed-source people that would be good to hire; but when you hire open-source developers whose work you know then you can do so with a higher degree of confidence, so if that works, why look elsewhere?