“Only a minority of people think of reporting bugs and, if they do think of it, they often fail to do so either because they think it’s too time-consuming or that they might end up looking silly.”

Most people don’t directly use open source, and reporting bugs in closed systems is rarely rewarding.

With the issue trackers that are common in open source, a bug reporter gets to watch the bug report’s lifecycle.

They can see what the developer – and others – think about the bug report. Is it a real bug? Was it reported previously? Is it worth fixing? Does the report contain sufficient detail to reproduce it?

With enough time, the reporter will learn if the bug is fixed or discarded or ignored. At the outer loop, they can become better reporters of bugs by seeing this play out enough times.

In contrast, bug reports to a typical end-user application go into a black hole from the moment they’re submitted. Even if said bug is eventually fixed, the reporter will be none the wiser about whether their submission was even looked at, let alone triggering the fix.