Linus’s law

Linus’s law states: given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The name was coined by Eric S. Raymond in his 1997 essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", where he credited the underlying practice to Linus Torvalds’s development of the Linux kernel.

The law’s claim is that a bug which stumps its original author may be obvious to some other contributor who reads the code with different assumptions, or who hits the failure under different conditions. A large, diverse population of co-developers and users, each looking at the code from a slightly different angle, is more likely to notice and correctly diagnose a given defect than a small closed team, however skilled, working in isolation. This was the central architectural claim behind the bazaar style of open-source development that Raymond contrasted with more closed, "cathedral" style projects.

The law is the reasoning behind the practice of release early, release often: shipping frequently gives a larger population of users and contributors more chances to exercise the code and report back what they find, which only pays off if the law itself holds. It is one of the most cited justifications for open-source development as an engineering strategy in its own right, rather than only an ideological or licensing stance.

The law is not unconditional. It depends on a large enough population of capable reviewers actually reading the code, not merely running it, and critics have pointed out that some classes of subtle or security-relevant bugs have persisted for years in widely used open-source projects despite many nominal eyeballs.

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