"Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up"
https://www.techworld.com/news/tech-innovation/microsoft-ser...
However, timers wrapping around is a very current problem every programmer should be aware of. Not too long ago we had a problem with corrupted video files. After weeks of investigation it turned out that some code used an 32 bit unsigned to count microseconds. Well, that wraps around after approx. 1 h 10 min... Obviously most test cases were videos shorter than that.
Not all programming is the same; there are many lessons to learn about software engineering (mostly in the "what not to do" sense) which, for practical reasons, have only ever showed up in (time- and budget-constrained) closed-source codebases.
Well, security by obscurity might happen a bit less. And hopefully many bugs in contributions are spotted instead of being merged because the author thinks it should work. But all major open source projects have had amazingly "stupid" programming bugs that went undiscovered for many years. Or the same feature has been patched again and again, but still causes more trouble.
Knowing that many company-internal software projects work with little review and very low testing coverage, it should be natural that their code quality is even worse. But that certain kinds of problems would only occur in closed source does not sound evident to me.
How could I have that, or the opposite of that, without access to closed-source code-bases?
That was my whole point: that you can't know what sort of selection bias you're implicitly accepting by only looking at a certain easily-accessible slice of the data.
In order to know that it's safe to assume that FOSS is representative of all software, you first have to get access to enough non-FOSS codebases to be representative.
This is a running theme on HN:
Why X does Y?
Well we don't know but let me talk abut Z in relation to X.
Did you seriously expect to see Windows source code published? AFAIK it is still under strict NDA regardless of how old it is or did I miss some headlines?