The Internet, as anyone who works deep in its trenches will tell you, is not a smooth, well-oiled machine. It’s a messy patchwork that has been assembled over decades, and it is held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape and bubble gum. Much of it relies on open-source software that is thanklessly maintained by a small army of volunteer programmers who fix the bugs.
Internet: <www.nytimes.com> (adapted). 

Considering the previous text and its linguistic aspects, judge the following item.

The word “it”, in the last sentence of the text, refers to “bubble gum”, mentioned in the prior sentence.