Where do reliability/stability problems typically come from?

99% of the time, system bugs/problems come from the stuff you do.

The code you wrote.

The hardware you designed.

The system you configured.

The custom PRC system you created.

Rarely are we affected by stability problems in the Linux kernel, the Zephyr RTOS, an OSS library, or a bug in a chip.

Why? Because these components have many more users and developers than the in-house pieces we develop.

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

Why are we so hesitant to update the open source system software in our product, but deploy new application updates that one developer created without a thought?

And ironically, the best way to avoid the rare problem in OSS components is to keep up-to-date.

We should be most suspect of the parts of the systems with few developers and users.

This is why YOUR Platform is so important -- because you reuse it, more developers work on it, and more users use it.

And by extension why it is so beneficial to open source parts of what you do. Even if you get only a few more users, it will get a lot better, making your products better.