Linus's law

{{short description|1999 claim by Eric S. Raymond about software development, named after Linus Torvalds}}

In software development, Linus's law is the assertion that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

The law was formulated by Eric S. Raymond in his essay and book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999), and was named in honor of Linus Torvalds.{{cite web |title=The Cathedral and the Bazaar |first=Eric S. |last=Raymond |author-link=Eric S. Raymond | work=catb.org |url=http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html}}{{cite book |title=The Cathedral and the Bazaar |first=Eric S. |last=Raymond |year=1999 |page=30 | publisher=O'Reilly Media |isbn=1-56592-724-9 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=F6qgFtLwpJgC&pg=PA30}}

A more formal statement is: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone." Presenting the code to multiple developers with the purpose of reaching consensus about its acceptance is a simple form of software reviewing. Researchers and practitioners have repeatedly shown the effectiveness of reviewing processes in finding bugs and security issues.{{cite book| first1=Charles P. |last1=Pfleeger|first2= Shari Lawrence |last2=Pfleeger|title=Security in Computing, 4th Ed. |isbn=0-13-239077-9 |pages=154–157 |publisher=Prentice Hall PTR |year=2003 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=O3VB-zspJo4C&pg=PA154 }}

Validity

In Facts and Fallacies about Software Engineering, Robert Glass refers to the law as a "mantra" of the open source movement, but calls it a fallacy due to the lack of supporting evidence and because research has indicated that the rate at which additional bugs are uncovered does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers; rather, there is a small maximum number of useful reviewers, between two and four, and additional reviewers above this number uncover bugs at a much lower rate.{{cite book |last=Glass |first=Robert L. |title=Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering |isbn=0-321-11742-5 |year=2003 |publisher=Addison-Wesley |page=174 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3Ntz-UJzZN0C&pg=PA174}} {{ISBN|978-0321117427}}. While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".{{cite book|last1=Howard |first1=Michael |last2=LeBlanc |first2=David |title=Writing Secure Code, 2nd. Ed. |pages=44–45, 615, 726 |isbn=0-7356-1722-8 |publisher=Microsoft Press |year=2003 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Uafp7m2wPcMC&q=Writing+Secure+Code }}

The persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered as a refutation of Raymond's dictum.{{cite web |first=Bruce |last=Byfield |title=Does Heartbleed Disprove 'Open Source is Safer'? |work=Datamation |date=April 14, 2014 |url=https://www.datamation.com/open-source/does-heartbleed-disprove-open-source-is-safer-1.html }}{{cite journal |doi=10.1038/scientificamerican0714-14 |first1=Edward W. |last1=Felten |first2=Joshua A. |last2=Kroll |title=Help Wanted on Internet Security |journal=Scientific American |year=2014 |volume=311 |issue=1 |page=14 |pmid=24974688 |bibcode=2014SciAm.311a..14F }} Larry Seltzer suspects that the availability of source code may cause some developers and researchers to perform less extensive tests than they would with closed source software, making it easier for bugs to remain.{{Cite web|url=https://www.zdnet.com/article/did-open-source-matter-for-heartbleed/ |date=April 14, 2014 |title=Did open source matter for Heartbleed?|first=Larry|last=Seltzer|website=ZDNet}}

In 2015, the Linux Foundation's executive director Jim Zemlin argued that the complexity of modern software has increased to such levels that specific resource allocation is desirable to improve its security. Regarding some of 2014's largest global open source software vulnerabilities, he says, "In these cases, the eyeballs weren't really looking".{{cite web | title=Why All Linux (Security) Bugs Aren't Shallow | date=February 20, 2015 | first=Sean Michael | last=Kerner | publisher=eSecurity Planet | url=http://www.esecurityplanet.com/open-source-security/why-all-linux-security-bugs-arent-shallow.html | access-date=February 21, 2015}} Large scale experiments or peer-reviewed surveys to test how well the mantra holds in practice have not been performed.{{Cite journal |last=Arceneaux |first=Kevin |last2=Gerber |first2=Alan S. |last3=Green |first3=Donald P. |date=January 2006 |title=Comparing Experimental and Matching Methods Using a Large-Scale Voter Mobilization Experiment |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/abs/comparing-experimental-and-matching-methods-using-a-largescale-voter-mobilization-experiment/E7B43806BEE0FB3000EE6627A9C03720 |journal=Political Analysis |language=en |volume=14 |issue=1 |pages=37–62 |doi=10.1093/pan/mpj001 |issn=1047-1987}}

Empirical support of the validity of Linus's law{{cite arXiv |last1=Amit |first1=Idan |last2=Feitelson |first2=Dror G.|date=2020 |title=The Corrective Commit Probability Code Quality Metric |class=cs.SE |eprint=2007.10912}} was obtained by comparing popular and unpopular projects of the same organization. Popular projects are projects with the top 5% of GitHub stars (7,481 stars or more). Bug identification was measured using the corrective commit probability, the ratio of commits determined to be related to fixing bugs. The analysis showed that popular projects had a higher ratio of bug fixes (e.g., Google's popular projects had a 27% higher bug fix rate than Google's less popular projects). Since it is unlikely that Google lowered its code quality standards in more popular projects, this is an indication of increased bug detection efficiency in popular projects.

Linus's law

Validity

See also

References

Further reading