>>29
Why would ethical issues that determine how a program is licensed have any significant effect on the quality of the code that is written?
These issues do not determine the quality of the code. I never claimed this.
The skill of the people writing the software, and their dedication to it, I would think, are much larger factors.
Indeed. But how does one go about getting skilled and dedicated programmers? In an open source project, your ability to bring in talent is crippled. You can only hope that the project you are working on is so admirable that it makes people want to work on it very hard for free.
These issues can be solved by selling your software. If you are working for a company that makes money by selling software, they can offer you incentive to work on their code. This company can also decide to only hire the best of programmers. Unlike open source projects, who take pretty much whoever they can, companies make sure to have some sort of standards.
And onto the dedication. While someone who is dedicated to an open source project may put in a couple hours a day at most into the project, at a software company, you are obligated to work for at least 8 hours on the code.
Propriety software is a better model for good software.