Linus's law

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Linus's law, named after Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". More formally: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone." The rule was formulated and named by Eric S. Raymond in his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Linus Torvalds himself also describes a notion as Linus's Law in the prologue to the book The Hacker Ethic: "Linus' Law says that all of our motivations fall into three basic categories. More important, progress is about going through those very same things as 'phases' in a process of evolution, a matter of passing from one category to the next. The categories, in order, are 'survival', 'social life', and 'entertainment'."<ref>Template:Citebook</ref> This idea is similar to that of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Criticism

Some studies have contested Linus's Law, citing the relatively small number of contributions made to open-source projects by "outside" people — that is, people not belonging to a small core group of developers<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>. This is largely the result of the necessary investment developers must make in setting up a build environment and understanding a piece of code before they can effectively contribute to it. Some projects also distrust external contributions, fearing that they might create difficult-to-find bugs or security holes, and so these projects create an inconvenient review process which can hinder external development.

Open source advocates will argue, however, that there are ways to mitigate these problems and ease the integration of external contributors. Following effective software engineering practices, it is possible to produce code that can be more easily maintained. Examples may include using modular components with loose coupling, or a good test suite for verifying external contributions, or a simple deployment strategy supported by tools like autoconf.

Also considered an important aid is having good documentation, including both high-level overviews and detailed interface descriptions, optionally supported by tools such as Javadoc and code visualization tools. Not all open-source projects implement such measures, however.

In security

One argument made against open source is that security flaws can be easily found by examining the source code, effectively destroying any security by obscurity. Others propose that this is a strength: it means that not only malicious users but also external developers and legitimate users can find such security holes more easily and diagnose attacks more quickly. By exposing problems sooner and to more people (including the majority with good intentions), security problems can often be fixed before the application is widely deployed and they become a more serious problem.

The ocular effect

"It's the ocular effect," said Tom Arriola, the developer of Crime Scene, a website that tasks its thousands of members with collectively solving fictional murder mysteries. "The more eyeballs that see it, the more likely it is that someone will see something that no one saw before."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

References

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See also

• Peer review
• Adages named after peoplees:Ley de Linus

he:חוק לינוס it:Legge di Linus nl:Wet van Linus pl:Prawo Linusa pt:Lei de Linus zh:林纳斯定律