Given Enough Eyeballs

Linus's Law — the open source principle of collective debugging.

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

— Eric S. Raymond, naming the principle after Linus Torvalds, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 1997

Also known as Linus’s Law.

The idea: if enough people can see the source code, someone will spot the bug. Closed source hides problems. Open source exposes them — and fixes them faster.

It is one of the foundational arguments for open-source software. Not just idealism. Engineering logic.

A bug that survives in the dark dies in the light.