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Linus's Law can refer to two different notions, both named after Linus Torvalds.
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Contents |
Linus's Law according to Eric S. Raymond
Linus's Law according to Eric S. Raymond 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 will be obvious to someone." The rule was formulated and named by Eric S. Raymond in his essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
Criticism
Some studies have contested Linus's Law. Software development experts Robert Glass, Michael Howard and David LeBlanc have stated that application of Linus's Law can lead to security and software maintenance problems[1][2] 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. 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. Microsoft, in their Get the Facts campaign to advertise Windows Server, published a statement from Apache Foundation director of security Ben Laurie saying that “Although it’s still often used as an argument, it seems quite clear to me that the “many eyes” argument, when applied to security, is not true.” [1]
Linus's Law according to Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds himself also describes a notion as Linus's Law in the prologue to the book The Hacker Ethic: "Linus's 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'."[3] This idea is similar to that of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Other usages
Linus Torvalds, in a tongue-in-cheek fashion in a GNOME-related mailing list discussion, wrote that "Linus's Law (nr 76 of 271)" was "Don't claim to have a config option, if you don't actually have the UI to change it."[4]
See also
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References
- ^ Glass, Robert L. Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. ISBN 032[[]]1117425
- ^ Howard, Michael and LeBlanc, David. Writing Secure Code, Second Edition. ISBN 0735617228
- ^ Himanen, Pekka; Linus Torvalds, Manuel Castells (2001-01-30). The Hacker Ethic. Random House. ISBN 0-375-50566-0.
- ^ Printing dialog and GNOME.
