"Many eyes make bugs shallower" is indeed true and a tautology.
The way ESR meant it, it's merely BS.
He meant is as in: "because open source code is available for everybody to see, many people look at it, and so bugs are found more easily".
In the context it was said, it was meant as a factual observation about what GOES ON in OSS, not merely as a trite theoritical description about many eyes being better.
So, people are arguing against that, not against the idea that if more people ACTUALLY look, they will find more bugs.
The case is, very few people look at code. In some cases, even for extremely widely used software by millions of OSS users, even less people than the people paid to look at a particular proprietary software look at the code.
Heck, Gtk, the basis of most Linux desktops, had in the latest years like 1-developer really working at it (I know, because he complained publicly about the situation).
I don't know what happens in the Windows GUI toolkit or Cocoa, but I doubt there's one person doing all the work -- and only during his free time at that...
"Many eyes make bugs shallower" is indeed true and a tautology.
The way ESR meant it, it's merely BS.
He meant is as in: "because open source code is available for everybody to see, many people look at it, and so bugs are found more easily".
In the context it was said, it was meant as a factual observation about what GOES ON in OSS, not merely as a trite theoritical description about many eyes being better.
So, people are arguing against that, not against the idea that if more people ACTUALLY look, they will find more bugs.
The case is, very few people look at code. In some cases, even for extremely widely used software by millions of OSS users, even less people than the people paid to look at a particular proprietary software look at the code.
Heck, Gtk, the basis of most Linux desktops, had in the latest years like 1-developer really working at it (I know, because he complained publicly about the situation).
I don't know what happens in the Windows GUI toolkit or Cocoa, but I doubt there's one person doing all the work -- and only during his free time at that...