I posted two links meditating on that, with plenty of examples and external supporting evidence, and neither of them support your guess. Refrain from tossing igneous shards while dwelling in a clear, noncrystalline abode.
(For concrete examples, read Rick Moen’s piece. For philosophy, read Eric Raymond’s.)
How Samba was written, or The French Café: Samba is a very widely-used piece of software that allows non-Microsoft computers (not always Linux machines) to access SMB shares on Windows boxes. As Microsoft hasn’t been forthcoming with complete documentation of how the SMB network protocol works, the Samba development team has had to reverse-engineer the protocol in a way very reminiscient of how you have to learn a foreign language if you don’t have a phrasebook or a helpful multilingual friend. It’s fascinating reading, especially if you have bought the lie that reverse-engineering is a code word for theft.
My statement was not intended as an opinion on the relative merits of open-source developers versus commercial developers (of course, they are often the same people, possibly at different times of the day). And I did not say anything about the quality of open-source software in general.
Rather, I was trying to explain to the OP why it is not implausible for a group of “volunteer hobbyists” to produce an office suite in their spare time. Even with above-average developers, the resulting product is not guaranteed to be bug-free and of stellar quality, but there’s nothing inherently impossible about it. There’s no magic ingredient required which only exists inside a commercial organization.
(OpenOffice is a bad example in this regard, however, because it was already a mostly-finished commercial product before Sun open-sourced it, so it does not tell us much about the design talents of open-source developers)
As to whether most open-source software is buggy, bloated and badly designed: that’s an interesting debate, and Emacs provides plenty of ammunition for both sides. If and when this thread gets moved to Great Debates, I’ll be happy to throw in my two pence.
Microsoft complains constantly about OSS. Most recently, according to this article and a number of other sources, they even attempted to change the transcript of a panel discussion to remove references to open source as a good thing.
Microsoft wages a constant PR war against open source software. I counted no less than four full pages of anti-Linux/anti-OSS adds from Microsoft in a recent issue of one of my tech mags (I think it was InfoWorld, but I’m not sure).
Just for the record, OpenOffice is not a “clone” of Microsoft Word by any definition. There are significant differences in the user interfaces–some are worse and some are better in my opinion–and the file conversions are good but not perfect. The functionality of the two products is similar, though. I’ve been using Microsoft Office since the first beta release of Word on the Macintosh over 20 years ago, and I just started using OpenOffice recently (I got tired of being forced to pay for updates that never seemed to improve the product). The two programs are different enough that there’s a pretty steep learning curve for those of us who really use the software. Some of the differences are fundamental and substantial.
You left off what’s probably the most-used BSD variant: Mac OSX. When they say “OSX has Unix underpinnings”, what they really mean is “OSX is Unix, wearing a pretty UI”.
While Microsoft’s public attitude to open source has certainly appeared confrontational and dogmatic at times, this isn’t their only approach…it’s easy to find articles on their website such as this (by searching for ‘open source’ at microsoft.com, surprise surprise!)
Of course, this basically means ‘how we can continue to make profits’. They are a commercial company. But they’re clearly aware of the threat of Linux, and Firefox, and OpenOffice, to their dominance of desktop environments, and want to find how to deal with it. One point I’ve heard before, and I still find plausible, is that they’d be capable of making unsupported Windows systems free. After all, they hardly make a huge proportion of their money from single-user off-the-shelf Windows packages. They could then compete on an even field for the ongoing technical support for businesses, etc.
However, they don’t want an even field. They want to be able to lock people in to their proprietary file formats and networking protocols and so on, and they couldn’t do that if they changed their business plan from software to support. Look at the huge stink they raised when Massachusetts decided to dump the proprietary Office file format in favor of the vendor-neutral Open Document Format: They had no rational reason to complain except that they lose lock-in whenever someone migrates away from an all-Microsoft ‘solution’.
Heterogeneity leads to interoperability, interoperability leads to commoditization, commiditization leads to massive price reductions.
If and when this thread gets moved to Great Debates, I’ll be happy to throw in my two pence.