I can confidently tell you that the code isn’t the best and, at times, it can be massively messy and even shit, but it works.
Well, this “but it works” is kinda the accepted standard in the corporate world, but not in open source projects.
And for a good reason: Open source projects with multiple contributors do have a long-term interest on well maintainable, understandable code. Precisely because working on them is not a one man (or woman) show and resources are limited, and open source consists of thousands of smaller projects that interoperate, so the demand to support cooperation is a necessity.
Conversely, in the corporate world (and I sweepingly include companies using Linux and FOSS software), and with the prevailing capitalist mindset, technical sustainability just does not matter. What matters is the bottom line for the current quarter, and nothing else.
These two wildly different goals create different strategies, and they are not very compatible.
Well, this “but it works” is kinda the accepted standard in the corporate world, but not in open source projects.
And for a good reason: Open source projects with multiple contributors do have a long-term interest on well maintainable, understandable code. Precisely because working on them is not a one man (or woman) show and resources are limited, and open source consists of thousands of smaller projects that interoperate, so the demand to support cooperation is a necessity.
Conversely, in the corporate world (and I sweepingly include companies using Linux and FOSS software), and with the prevailing capitalist mindset, technical sustainability just does not matter. What matters is the bottom line for the current quarter, and nothing else.
These two wildly different goals create different strategies, and they are not very compatible.