Stephen Covey describes stages of maturity as dependence, independence and interdependence. Mature FOSS contributors/projects do the latter.
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An Experimental Evaluation of the Assumption of Independence in Multi-Version Programming, by John Knight and Nancy Leveson https://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/nver-tse.pdf
If you take bunch of programs written independently, are you more likely to reduce bugs by taking the most common output?
Looks like it was difficult for GitHub to maintain independence: it wasn't profitable for much of 2016:
