Comment by pessimizer

> The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality goods before buying, so the demand for high and low-quality goods is artificially even. The cause is asymmetric information.

That's where FOSS or even proprietary "shared source" wins. You know if the software you depend on is generally badly or generally well programmed. You may not be able to find the bugs, but you can see how long the functions are, the comments, and how things are named. YMMV, but conscientiousness is a pretty great signal of quality; you're at least confident that their code is clean enough that they can find the bugs.

Basically the opposite of the feeling I get when I look at the db schemas of proprietary stuff that we've paid an enormous amount for.