Comment by doctor_eval
2 years ago
I agree with this take.
I was a developer at the time (still am), and if I'm remembering correctly, ESR was active in Slashdot and a few other places I hung out.
I took ESR's claim about bugs to imply that the quality of open source software would be greater than that of proprietary software because the number of people who had access to the code would inevitably result in less bugs. A lot of the discussions around C&B at the time were about software quality. I don't think anyone expected there to be zero bugs, just that there would be fewer.
I am not convinced it turned out that way, but that's an interesting discussion for another thread.
It seems at least plausible an argument I read years ago, maybe in Raymond Chen's blog, that in reality the only thing that makes a difference is paying people to look for bugs and fix them because people don't like doing that that much.