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Comment by mjw1007

2 years ago

I don't think "bugs are shallow", or the "many eyeballs" section of this essay, are particularly talking about _discovering_ bugs.

The author seems to have had a worldview in which bugs don't really matter if people aren't coming across them, and in which the difficult part of dealing with a bug is either reproducing it or getting from a symptom to a cause.

If you were in a world where those two things are true then I think he's probably right that "many eyeballs" would help a great deal.

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mjw1007

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tptacek  2 years ago

It's not interesting to say that lots of interesting eyeballs are helpful. Anybody would have said that prior to this article's publication. Raymond makes a much stronger claim (which is why it has the force of "law"), and it hasn't borne out.

  • jasmer  2 years ago

    It's interesting to say 'a lot of eyeballs will do something' in a world where nobody believed it.

    I think this thread overstates the reality of the very, very crude metaphor that illustrates 'why open source can work' - even if it is very flawed.

    I think by now we all kind of know 'it depends' aka there's context to everything.

  • colinsane  2 years ago

    if your process is “release often, but preserve quality by a staged release process (betas) in which power users can fix bugs before they reach the masses” then you’re pretty explicitly allowing bugs to be in the codebase transiently. combine that with projects of this era shipping with files like BUGS or ISSUES alongside their README or NEWS/release notes, and you have strong evidence that “transient” means “can knowingly be included in a release”. at that point it just feels false to read ESR as claiming anything strong like “with enough eyes the software will contain no latent bugs” (which i think is how one side of this thread is interpreting the essay?)

  • mjw1007  2 years ago

    Again: the purported law says "shallow", not "soon discovered".

    • tptacek  2 years ago

      No, you can't get away with this semantic dodge, because Raymond numbered what he believed were the most important lessons he was imparting, and the one corresponding to Linus' Law is:

      8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

      He even attempted an axiomatic explanation:

      Maybe it shouldn't have been such a surprise, at that. Sociologists years ago discovered that the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. They called this the Delphi effect. It appears that what Linus has shown is that this applies even to debugging an operating system—that the Delphi effect can tame development complexity even at the complexity level of an OS kernel.

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    • coldtea  2 years ago

      If they're not "soon discovered" then the use of the term "shallow" means absolutely nothing...