Ask E.T.: Why Software is So Bad

Ask E.T.: Why Software is So Bad: "Tim Josling stated, 'In economics there is a principle that something that customers cannot assess will not be produced or will be low quality. In the case of software, people can easily assess features, but not quality or security. So we get feature rich but buggy and insecure software.'
I'd like to suggest a comparison between the 'free software' built by the GNU/Linux community vs. the software built by proprietary software vendors such as Microsoft. While 'free software' software is not perfect, I find it to be much more reliable than proprietary software. On those occasions when a problem does arise, the end user can often get directly in touch with the author who will take it as a point of pride to fix it asap.
For those who don't know, GNU and Linux are 'free software'. I.E. they're licensed under something called the General Public License (GPL) - a.k.a. 'copyleft'. This licensing concept was invented by Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project, who explains that the 'free' in 'free software' means 'free as in freedom' not 'free as in free beer'. In other words, someone can charge money for 'free software' but their software must come with the freedom to examine how it works, and change how it works if needed.
Source code is the version of the program in the language that the programmer wrote it in. Source code to proprietary systems is kept secret by the company who develops it. Thus, as noted by Josling above, customers cannot assess quality or security. And just as in government, when things are done behind closed doors, bad results are common. This is usually either because the company considers the code to be 'good enough' to ship even when it's known to have flaws, or because the company's interests are at odds w"

Continued....
Read more at Ask E.T.: Why Software is So Bad