Comment by thw0rted

There's a variant / corollary of the Efficient Market Hypothesis here, though.

Let's say the GP's XML library has The GTA Bug, i.e. it uses a quadratic-performance loop when parsing. The bug will go undiscovered until any one consumer of the library a) sees enough performance impact to care, b) has the expertise to profile their application and finds that the library is at fault, and c) reports the problem back to the library owner so that it can be fixed. This combination might be unlikely but since only one consumer has to have all those properties, the probability scales inversely with the number of library users.