Users say open source quality high

A new poll by Methods & Tools magazine shows that of people that had an opinion, 82% ranked open source software such as MySQL, Eclipse, PHP, or JBoss superior or identical in quality to their commercial equivalents. Several possible reasons are given for this perception:

- Developers and users (not customers!) have a higher sense of product's ownership. They feel that they both contribute to something special and it is not "just a job" or "just a product"

- The relationship between users and developers are less confrontational because:

• money is not the matter
• expectations are often different
• open source organisations seems to have a better responsiveness to customers requests/bugs

Out of 524 people who participated in the survey, 30% said there was no simple answer or didn't have experience with both commercial and open source. Out of the rest, approximately 54% said open source was the same quality, 28% said it was superior, and 18% said it was inferior.