Linus's law

programmingops culture

'Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.'

Eric Raymond coined the phrase in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and named it for Linus Torvalds, as the core argument for open source's quality advantage. Heartbleed became its standing counterexample: the code was open for years, but almost nobody was actually looking. The modern reading adds the missing clause: eyeballs must be funded, qualified, and pointed at the code.

← All glossary entries