Linux Developers Fix Bugs Faster Than Apple & Google: Report

A recent report from Google’s Project Zero suggests that Linux developers fixed bugs faster than anyone. For starters, Project Zero contains a team of Google’s security analysts and is used to find zero-day vulnerabilities in open-source projects.

Linux Devs are faster than Apple & Google

The stats are from January 2019 to December 2021. Linux programmers fixed 24 bugs in 25 days, 66% faster than Apple. What’s surprising is that, in 2019, the average speed of Linux devs patching issues was 32 days and has now improved by a significant margin.

Linux devs solve bugs faster than Apple's --- Report

Now, it should be noted that Apple’s devs had more bugs to fix. However, the average days to fix is much higher at 69 days. Google fixed a total of 53 out of 56 bugs with the second-lowest average days to fix stats of 44. Mozilla follows with 46, with Microsoft being the last at 83 days.

It should also be noted that Microsoft fixed 15 bugs (19%) in the grace period. In contrast, Apple set 7 (8%), and Google fixed 2 (4%).

For the average days to fix time, the report says, “the overall time to fix has consistently decreased, but most significantly between 2019 and 2020. Overall, Microsoft, Apple, and Linux have reduced their time to fix during this period. Google sped up in 2020 before slowing down again in 2021. Perhaps most impressively, the others not represented on the chart have collectively cut their time to fix in more than half. However, this may represent a change in research targets rather than a change in practices for any particular vendor.”

“Others” in the table include companies like Facebook, Git, Canonical, Intel, Kubernetes, Node.js, Qualcomm, RedHat, and Zoom.