ManyEyesMakeAllBugsShallow™

Linus has a famous quote “Many eyes make all bugs shallow”. The freetard community has taken this to mean “everyone who uses linux will spot bugs in the source code” and they’ll be fixed before you can even encounter them.

Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of Linus Law

Linus’ 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.”

So what Linus actually said was that lots of developers and testers make good software. Which is exactly how most real software companies operate. Unfortunately, this is rare in the FOSS community. The developers are hobbyists and amateurs and the “testers” are the poor users.

Only a handful of the people involved in FOSS are actually qualified to look at the source code, so “many eyes” has now been reduced to “a few eyes”. And just because someone is a developer doesn’t mean they understand the software. A guy who administrates servers probably isn’t going to know much about MRI scanners, for example, making it impossible for him or her to figure out the MRI scanner source code in the first place.

Of course, this says nothing of the Mythical Man Month that states you can’t simply solve a problem by throwing more developers at it.