NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Linus's law

Linus' Law can refer to two notions, both named after Linus Torvalds. Linus Benedict Torvalds ( ; born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of the Linux kernel. ...

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". Eric S. Raymond (FISL 6. ... A software bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e. ... In software engineering, development stage terminology expresses how far through the development sequence things have progressed and how much further development a product may require. ... 3 programmers. ... The Cathedral and the Bazaar (abbreviated CatB) is an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. ...

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 problems^[1]^[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. In computer science, coupling or dependency is the degree to which each program module relies on each other module. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... Flow diagram of autoconf and automake Autoconf is a tool for producing shell scripts that automatically configure software source code packages to adapt to many kinds of UNIX-like systems. ...

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. Maslows Hierarchy of Human Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, which he subsequently extended to include his observations of mans innate curiosity. ...

References

Pekka Himanen (born October 19, 1973) is a Finnish philosopher. ... Linus Benedict Torvalds ( ; born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of the Linux kernel. ... Manuel Castells (b. ...

Contents

Linus' Law according to Eric S. Raymond

Criticism

Linus' Law according to Linus Torvalds

References

See also