As you can see, it's obvious that some heavy-duty software can be and has been built on Open Source components. Reliability is only one of the advantages of Open Source software. Another advantage is cost. Not only is Open Source software cheaper because it's free, it's also a cheaper approach to bug fixing and software maintenance. Surprisingly this cost is strongly affected by the number of users.
More users find more bugs.
When those users are also empowered to find the bugs in the source code and propose fixes, for free, it's obvious that maintaining an Open Source application is much cheaper than the closed source alternative. Open Source Problems Open Source is reliable, stable, more bug-free, and cheaper. Yes, Open Source is not a panacea for every computing problem. Yes, there are some things that Open Source won' t do. Open Source is not, for example, a good way to originate code.