Up until not too long ago, it seemed like if the leading proprietary tool was half baked, the open source tool was a quarter baked. Take office suites. OpenOffice was pretty consistently ten years behind MS Office. Or GIMP was constantly lagging behind Photoshop in usability, but now is a very good photo editor. The exception has always been development tools, where you get a nice confluence of motivation to volunteer and people knowing what they want.
Up until not too long ago, it seemed like if the leading proprietary tool was half baked, the open source tool was a quarter baked. Take office suites. OpenOffice was pretty consistently ten years behind MS Office. Or GIMP was constantly lagging behind Photoshop in usability, but now is a very good photo editor. The exception has always been development tools, where you get a nice confluence of motivation to volunteer and people knowing what they want.