Code sucks everywhere. Unless you're working on a library or something personal, then there's no (or very few) organisations that are churning out 'academically pure' code. The UK doesn't software industry doesn't have dibs on that.
Some companies write code that's public, and then, while it might still suck, there is at least some motivation for improving it, and a better chance of it being paletable.
I've worked for a company which had a 100% open-source product and their priority was to keep that boat floating rather than making any improvements.
Probably because the resource requirements to actually be able to do that were way above what they had at their disposal. Especially having such an old codebase.
The time it takes to make simple updates should be enough motivation. I just spent the best part of a day adding a simple dialog before submitting a form. Took forever to get the development environment put together to run the code locally then trying to understand the mess of JavaScript in the relevant function with all it's nested callbacks to add a couple of lines of code. I tried refactoring it a bit, hopefully its a bit more readable for the next person. I doubt anyone will actually give a shit though.
