Empirical evidence disagrees, however; scientific tests, described below, have found GNU software to be more reliable than comparable proprietary software.

Free Software is More Reliable!
https://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.en.html

Apologists for proprietary software like to say, “free software is a nice dream, but we all know that only the proprietary system can produce reliable products. A bunch of hackers just can’t do this.”

Empirical evidence disagrees, however; scientific tests, described below, have found GNU software to be more reliable than comparable proprietary software.

This should not be a surprise; there are good reasons for the high reliability of GNU software, good reasons to expect free software will often (though not always) have high reliability.

These researchers found that the commercial Unix systems had a failure rate that ranged from 15% to 43%. In contrast, the failure rate for GNU was only 7%.

Miller also said that, “the three commercial systems that we compared in both 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had significant rates of failure (the basic utilities from GNU/Linux still were noticeably better than those of the commercial systems).”

IBM Watson’s Next Challenge: Modernize Legacy Code
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/machine-learning/ibm-ai-watson-modernize-legacy-code