Comment by DonHopkins
19 hours ago
He made up the ridiculous "many eyes" quote himself, then misnamed it "Linus's Law" to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing, and which HeartBleed and many other eyeballable bugs proved terribly wrong and misguided. About which the salty security expert Theo de Raadt famously said "Oh right, let's hear some of that "many eyes" crap again. My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code."
Perhaps "...slightly shallower" would have been more appropriate, but that isn't as catchy.
The term "many eyes" is certainly doing a lot of work, because practically nobody (beyond the exceptionally qualified but justifiably abrasive Theo de Raadt), and ESPECIALLY not ESR, ever bothers to actually read or is actually qualified to understand and audit source code. And the few that are qualified usually have other things to do with their precious time, because all the Big Tech FAANG MegaCorps and venture funded startups that exploit their hard work never bother supporting them in any way.
Ironically the one time he did try, he beclowned himself by totally misunderstanding and misrepresenting it, due to his illegitimate preconceptions, extremist political agenda, intellectual dishonesty, lack of expertise, quote mining, gullibility to conspiracy theories, and cultivated misconceptions.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Climategate
>Climategate
>During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)