> I mean shit, I don't need to be an aeronautical engineer or work in the FAA to say that several people investigating an airliner crash will be more effective than one single dude sifting through a literal field of debris.
With zero people looking at airliner failures, nothing will be discovered, no matter how many inspectors the FAA has on its payroll. In the software world, there are almost no people doing code audits. Bugs and security holes are left in live code for years. Basically, Theo is saying "Shut up and audit."
How much open source code have you audited for bugs recently? How many subtle correctness issues have you found in projects you've looked at? For the sake of code quality, I certainly hope it's higher than the amount I've audited.
"Linus's Law" itself says little about whether or not people will actually look at code. It just says that more people looking is better than fewer people looking.
How much code I have audited, you have audited, ESR has audited, or hell, how much code Paul McCartney has audited, really has little to do with the obvious correctness and banality of the 'law'.
In other words, your interpretation of "Linus's Law" has no impact on code quality in the real world. Edit: However, since it's meant to imply that in open source, there are people looking at code, I think that the criticisms stand.
Yes, in the sense that Crito's Law (coined by me, now) "The bigger the ship, the more freight you can fit in it." has no impact on the real-world ship transport industry.
It is obviously true to the point of being banal. It is a pointless statement of uncontroversial fact that provides next to no utility to anybody. It's not even interesting for being a tautology.
If I were a particularly objectionable and self-promoting person, then perhaps people might object to Crito's Law whenever it were quoted on shipping forums, but that wouldn't make it incorrect. Nor would my shameless self-promotion make it profound.
(Is Crito's Law _precisely_ true? Well no, some large ships are not designed for freight after all... but the general principle is true.)
"Many eyes make bugs shallower" is indeed true and a tautology.
The way ESR meant it, it's merely BS.
He meant is as in: "because open source code is available for everybody to see, many people look at it, and so bugs are found more easily".
In the context it was said, it was meant as a factual observation about what GOES ON in OSS, not merely as a trite theoritical description about many eyes being better.
So, people are arguing against that, not against the idea that if more people ACTUALLY look, they will find more bugs.
The case is, very few people look at code. In some cases, even for extremely widely used software by millions of OSS users, even less people than the people paid to look at a particular proprietary software look at the code.
Heck, Gtk, the basis of most Linux desktops, had in the latest years like 1-developer really working at it (I know, because he complained publicly about the situation).
I don't know what happens in the Windows GUI toolkit or Cocoa, but I doubt there's one person doing all the work -- and only during his free time at that...
With zero people looking at airliner failures, nothing will be discovered, no matter how many inspectors the FAA has on its payroll. In the software world, there are almost no people doing code audits. Bugs and security holes are left in live code for years. Basically, Theo is saying "Shut up and audit."
How much open source code have you audited for bugs recently? How many subtle correctness issues have you found in projects you've looked at? For the sake of code quality, I certainly hope it's higher than the amount I've audited.