Linus Torvalds's Kevo

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Linus' Law can refer to two notions, both named after Linus Torvalds.

Linus' Law according to Eric S. Raymond

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 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' Law. Software development experts Robert Glass, Michael Howard and David LeBlanc have stated that application of Linus' Law can lead to security and software maintenance problems¹[2] 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.

Approaches suggested by open source advocates[citation needed] to avoid these problems and to generate more maintainable code 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.

Mathematical interpretation

Modeling mathematically the software development of a team of N developers and considering the probability to find an error independent for every developer in the project, can be shown that, when the number of developers tends to infinity, the probability to have some error in the program tends to zero exponentially with the number of developers, demonstrating the efficiency of this law.¹

Linus' Law according to Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds himself also describes a notion as Linus' 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'."³ This idea is similar to that of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

References

1. ^ Glass, Robert L. Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. ISBN 0321117425
2. ^ Howard, Michael and LeBlanc, David. Writing Secure Code, Second Edition. ISBN 0735617228
3. ^ Himanen, Pekka; Linus Torvalds, Manuel Castells (2001-01-30). The Hacker Ethic. Random House. ISBN 0-375-50566-0.