8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
He even attempted an axiomatic explanation:
Maybe it shouldn't have been such a surprise, at that. Sociologists years ago discovered that the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. They called this the Delphi effect. It appears that what Linus has shown is that this applies even to debugging an operating system—that the Delphi effect can tame development complexity even at the complexity level of an OS kernel.
The longer paragraph doesn't seem to contradict the notion either. My impression (based on the "How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity" chapter) is that Raymond thought that "debugging" means "fixing bugs".
If I were criticising this part of essay, I'd say the main weakness is that the things Raymond thought of as "taming complexity" weren't really addressing the hard problem of reducing the number of bugs.
If the objective is just to fix bugs that have been found, well, that doesn't really feed into this narrative. Also, ESR was making a very large number of claims about the efficacy of OSS, and limiting the scope to bugs already discovered would not really align with the rest of the goings-on at the time.
That's a qualifier for what follows it. Seems true enough to me. If there are enough developers to notice bugs, they will probably be found and fixed quickly.
Right, what about this one: the bugs are all found eventually, only not by the right person.
Just kidding :)
I was a developer at the time (still am), and if I'm remembering correctly, ESR was active in Slashdot and a few other places I hung out.
I took ESR's claim about bugs to imply that the quality of open source software would be greater than that of proprietary software because the number of people who had access to the code would inevitably result in less bugs. A lot of the discussions around C&B at the time were about software quality. I don't think anyone expected there to be zero bugs, just that there would be fewer.
I am not convinced it turned out that way, but that's an interesting discussion for another thread.
The key word here is characterized. That word is not equivalent to found.
Security vulnerabilities are unique in that they matter despite being unknown.
Other bugs are only important because of their direct impact on users. It's not unreasonable to take everything here and apply it to known bugs, and not to unknown vulnerabilities.
I think this thread overstates the reality of the very, very crude metaphor that illustrates 'why open source can work' - even if it is very flawed.
I think by now we all kind of know 'it depends' aka there's context to everything.