Well, the core Perl language comes with several modules. If an author wrote a core module, then his "third-party" modules are probably of high-quality. I had to use this line of reasoning when my managers (and co-workers) initiated an unjustified witch-hunt against Net::FTP. We were getting inconsistent behavior in our Perl script which used this module and everyone around the table was throwing terms around like "3rd party", "contributed", "freeware".

My other line of reasoning was: "this freeware has been around since 1996 which means it has had over 1 million independent installations and tests in many environments. Thus, it has had lots of time to receive and fix bug reports.