It's one of those things where what is said works in the way it has been worded, not in the way its author thought it worked. I mean, at its face value, the bu

It's one of those things where what is said works in the way it has been worded, not in the way its author thought it worked. I mean, at its face value, the bugs have a better chance of being fixed because more people can see them. And the open source license, technically, empowers every user. Yes, even today, I can fix whatever I please and disregard whatever everyone says about "being a part of the community" and "decision process". And I can distribute the fixes on my own. In this sense, the "law" is working, it's just as obvious as the fact that it's way easier to run a company in a country with fewer regulations and simpler tax law than in a country with more regulations and more complex tax law. However, there are also other confounding factors which may negate this maxim. For example, the bystander effect is pretty big. Sure there's someone else fixing this. Or there's the fatigue of pull requests being enqueued for years. Or there is, on one hand, a stigma that you have to have a galaxy brain to work on X, while at the same time people making X may make mistakes but no one feels it's right to question them, because they are "galaxy brains" by definition. There's also this factor of eyeballs being tired, not really interested, not looking really carefully. And yet, once known, things do get fixed rather rapidly. In open source, I haven't seen yet an equivalent of the AWS status page. So, yeah, it doesn't guarantee you things. But when we're talking about all else being equivalent except for the license, an open-source X will be better, on average, than a closed-source X. Most areas of work benefit from transparency.