Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Raymond's 1999 formulation, named for Torvalds. Heartbleed sat in OpenSSL for two years despite being open source, which suggests eyeballs must be both numerous and looking.
In practice
- A typo in a public document is corrected within the hour, and a subtle flaw in the same document sits for two years, both equally visible.
- The defensible version is that eyeballs must be both numerous and looking — a project with many users and no funded reviewers has neither.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- The programmers' folklore, and technology's place in society