“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
Eric S. Raymond, whose quote is now known as Linus’ Law in honour of Linus Torvalds.
In other words, if you have enough people looking at the code, someone will surely categorise the problem and then the community will also figure out a way to solve it.
The fragmentation of the OSS industry means that OSS eyeballs are spread across thousands of code bases. Based on the inverse of Linus’ Law, there’s an implication that OSS bugs are deep. In fact, there are so many defects and/or enhancements waiting to be resolved across our industry that only the highest priority tickets tend to get any eyeballs at all.
The open-source revolution has ensured that the code of the most important applications (I use the word “important” figuratively) get lots of eyeballs. It’s one of the reasons that I believe the next OSS revolution will come about when an open-source OSS (an OSS OSS??) starts getting a critical mass of eyeballs. That OSS OSS just needs to be compelling enough to draw the eyeballs to it.
This is one of the pillars in the Call for Innovation that will be released here on PAOSS shortly.
Have you ever had an OSS or BSS project that’s impacted by poor data quality? The problem of data integrity gets raised on almost every
“One of my favorite things about designing software is designing the defaults. The defaults define the experience for everyone out of the box. And, therefore,
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Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
