Why Open-Source Means Higher Quality

With software products the situation is very different from furniture and other tangible products. For almost every commercial software program there is an open-source alternative of no lesser quality. For example, commercial Camtasia that allows you to create screen casts is not much better than its open-source alternative Camstudio. Photoshop is very powerful but GIMP is very good as well. "Free" or "cheap" does not necessarily mean "poor" quality in the software world. In fact, it often means the opposite. Here how things work in the web design field.

1. Joomla and other open-source web content management systems (CMS) are developed by highly qualified and very well paid developers who are sponsored by big-shot corporations. The projects are then reviewed, analyzed and supported by an international design community. If you are a software developer, it is a great honour to work for an open-source project like Joomla. Only cream of the crops are selected to work for such organizations. Open-source projects are funded by large corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, etc. 
2. When an open-source community releases a product, they receive feedback from users and other developers and designers from all over the world. Being non-profit, they are not in a rush to get to the market ahead of the competition. As a result, their products do not have the same type of "cutting corners" designs that commercial software companies most always have.By the way, typical software development companies very rarely test their products in the field, i.e. no real user feedback is gathered and analyzed (hard to believe, yes, but true nonetheless!). Only feedback from their own internal test team or staff members is usually taken into account. And we all know how political correctness and not willingness to offend or criticize the work of your peers can affect quality. This is not the case with Joomla or other international open-source projects.
3. Open-source software is less "buggy". Testing is conducted by dozens of designers from all over the world and in multiple rounds. There is no pressure to purposefully leave bugs in the software in order to secure lucrative support contracts, a practice routinely employed by software development companies. Once a client purchases a commercial CMS, they are soon forced to sign up for an annual "support" contract, which is usually around 17-20% of the total cost of the software. These support contracts form a large part of the revenue generated by most software companies. With Joomla, you need very little support, if any, and the more you use your website, the more experience you gain, the less support you would need. In our experience, most support we provide to our clients relate to hosting issues.
4. Product decisions are not driven by Marketing. In a typical mid-sized software company of under 200 people, you will have 10-12 people at most involved in key product decisions. And none of these people have their reputation or salaries affected by releasing a poor product. Commercial (or "enterprise" level) software sales are often secured via personal connections of sales managers, not via real marketing or customer references. Whoever has the largest marketing budget and the best personal connections in the corporate world gets their software sold faster and grabs the largest market share, regardless of the quality of their products. This is very different from how open-source projects work.
5. Open source projects do not conduct aggressive consumer-oriented or B2B marketing campaigns to promote the benefits of their products. They are funded by large corporations, but they are, nonetheless, separate non-profit entities. They rely on the knowledge base of their design community and the reputation they have within its members. Reputation and user references are the main marketing vehicles of most open-source products.
6. Furthermore, most web design shops are not interested in decreasing the development time if they bill their clients per hour, so they do not go out of their way to introduce or explain the benefits of open-source CMS. So if you are not aware of Joomla or other open-source CMS in the first place, you might not come across this information when you do your web design research. Most people end up learning the hard way: by making a mistake and locking themselves into a proprietary CMS sold to them by their web design firm. They end up eventually changing design firms and hosting companies before someone tells them or they stumble upon an advice about using Joomla or other open-source web management systems.
7. Then, there is a lot of misinformation on the Internet promoted by commercial CMS providers who conduct routine marketing campaigns by submitting articles to various online media. Their most common claims are that open-source software is not flexible, does not have enough features, that those features are not granular enough, or that it is hard to learn. All of these claims are far from the truth. I remember working as a marketing communications manager at a hardware design company and we had to pay $2000 to get a feature in our commercial CMS which is the most basic of all open-source CMS, i.e. ability to see image sizes and image specifications in detail. Mind you, this was a few years back, but still at that time, Joomla and Drupal already had these features by default.
8. Public believes this mantra that you get what you pay for and they are not familiar with the background or context of how open source software is produced. This mantra is religiously supported by larger media and advertising agencies. As we mentioned earlier, this mantra depends on the context and on the type of product you buy. For hardware and material products it applies more often, of course, but the particular circumstances of how international open-source projects like Joomla work negate this mantra completely. As a result I know companies of a similar size that spend $250,000 on web marketing per year and are making $4-8 million in annual revenues and I know companies that spend $50,000 on web marketing per year and make the same amount. It is hard to believe, because we all innately inclined to assume that common sense rules, but - sadly - this is more often than not the case.
9. Marketing Managers don't want to take "risks" and chose a "safer" route. In most organizations, Boards of Directors consist of a very specific demographic, i.e. 90% men of over 55 years of age. This group was raised and matured during pre-business-software and pre-internet times, so "you get what you pay for" to them is directly transplanted to software products, and they usually know little about web technologies and how open-source projects work. As a result, if a Marketing Manager, Director or even Vice President (boy! don't you love big names!) selects an open-source software and then, for some reason, sales figures would not turn as high as the Board expected them to be, the Board members are likely to blame the open-source software (or marketing methods) - because it is free, that's why, they would state - for the poor results. Remember, we are not talking TV advertising, which is outrageously expensive. In practice, the price you pay for your software or CMS or even online marketing campaigns have no direct relation to your marketing and sales results. Knowledge, experience, creativity, common sense and intelligence of your marketing people - those are the most important factors that affect how successful your web marketing will be. But fortunately, times are changing. More information is being published, people learn more, and even older generation changes the ways they do things. 
10. Many things related to web marketing are done on the "must do because everyone else is doing it" basis. If competitors are buying this software, we need to buy it as well or buy a similar software. If everyone is twitting, then we need to tweet too. Very few companies know how to measure the effectiveness of their tools and campaigns. 

Take all these factors together, and it is easy to see why reputable international open-source software projects like Joomla is typically of a much higher quality than their commercial counterparts and why so few people know about it and why some are still afraid to use it. With baby boomers retiring from decision making roles, the situation is definitely changing. Younger managers recognize the difference and are willing to take advantage of these new "digital" opportunities open-source software delivers. Lets just hope open-source software like Joomla stays free. If you would like to know why Joomla and not Drupal, check out this forum discussion as well as a CMS comparison article we wrote.