Millions of pixels have been sacrificed exclaiming the glories and greatness of open source. Most everybody but Microsoft agrees and even Microsoft seems to have come around lately. At least on paper. There is, to be sure, a lot to say in its favor and most of what I’ve read against it appears more like special pleading than reasoned argument.
It’s surprising, then, to see an argument in its favor that I hadn’t seen before. A couple of years ago, koderski over at the Gamedev subreddit had an interesting observation. He noted that 38% of the bug reports on his game came from the Linux community. That might not seem too surprising except that Linux users are only 5.8% of the game’s user base.
You might think that those figures mean that the Linux version is buggy but when koderski looked at the data we found that only 3 out of the 400 bug reports from Linux users were platform specific. The rest were bugs that existed for all users. As koderski puts it, each Linux user gets you 650% more bug reports. He says that that’s like having a free QA department.
Koderski puts this down to Linux (and by extension, open source) users being trained to report bugs thanks to their involvement with open source, which depends on such user participation. Linus’s law, as formulated by Eric Raymond, famously asserts that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow but this is a bit different. We don’t have fellow developers pursuing the code, just users who noticed that something was wrong and took the time to report it to the developer.