Talk:Many eyes fallacy

Terminology standard?
Googling "many eyes fallacy" or "many eyeballs fallacy" gives very few results. However, "many eyes" fallacy, "many eyeballs" fallacy, and "enough eyeballs" fallacy give quite a few, mostly related to this idea. It would appear that there is no standard terminology, at least not yet, for this idea. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 08:45, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, this page seems to be almost along the lines of (a) "original research" -- (googling for "many eyes fallacy" hardly returns anything except wikipedia derivatives) and also seems to fail the (b) notability criterion. It is as if someone with an axe to grind against "open source" has written this page up. Labeling something a fallacy is a big deal, unless it is established that it is a fallacy. Here, we see an entire page devoted to the "fallacy". This is highly (c) perjorative. At best, there should be a criticism section in the original page, which there already is. That suffices, and accordingly, this page should be (d) merged with that page. This entire page violates (e) NPOV. Though I think this page should be deleted, I am marking 3 tags on this page, and should wait for viewpoints of others. -- User:deego

Fallacies in criticism
I have found at lest two fallacies in the "criticism" lists, which I proceed to mention:


 * "Writing secure code is difficult[...]. As a result, the measure "enough eyeballs" is irrelevant; what is more important is "enough highly-trained eyeballs"


 * Even if catching unintentional security bugs is possible with "enough eyeballs", finding an intentional backdoor may not be, because the contributor could potentially disguise it.

These two sentences do not counter in any way the argument of Linus's Law. What a criticism should deal with is if more eyeballs are worse, or at least not better. The first pseudo-criticism above is just ridiculous, for two reasons:


 * 1) If a fraction of all eyeballs are trained, more eyeballs = more trained eyeballs
 * 2) Even if not, it is debatable whether less eyeballs = more trained eyeballs, isn't it?
 * 3) If more eyeballs != more trained eyeballs, and less eyeballs != more trained eyeballs, then, the number of trained eyeballs does not depend on the number of eyeballs. That is obviously ridiculous.

The second pseudo-criticism assumes that if a problem is easy to solve, the more people working on it the better, but if it is difficult, then the amount of people working on it is not relevant. This is a top-notch non sequitur, unacceptable with no evidence that supports why the degree of difficulty of a problem is a factor.

If no correction is made in a short term, I'll remove the two "arguments". &mdash; Isilanes 13:04, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Linus's law
Merge as this article is rather short and applies exclusively to Linus's law. --Theosch 10:19, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Merge and remove WP:OR. At that point I would expect this to be a sentence or two, or even a footnote to list critics of Linus's law. Concepts from books, in my opinion, only deserve articles if the book is widely read and/or the term or concept 'has a life outside of the book' though references by notable figures or publications. This article does not pass that test IMHO. Antonrojo 15:46, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I may attempt a merge, time permitting. Antonrojo 15:46, 11 March 2007 (UTC)