Comment by colinsane

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?)