I am with Theo on this one. The many eyes argument is a poor one for a large number of reasons. Bugs are one issue regarding security but software design is a

I am with Theo on this one. The many eyes argument is a poor one for a large number of reasons. Bugs are one issue regarding security but software design is a much bigger one. It is good design that ensures that software is robust even when bugs surface and that's a far larger issue than the question of bugs. The problem with ESR's view here is that it occurs in a more general essay on this matter come up with the idea that open source has the advantage because of eyeballs, distributed design and so forth. But you can only distribute design so far, and almost every successful open source project has a small design and engineering team. This being said there are plenty of cases where I do in fact rely on many eyes. It's not that it makes the bugs shallower but that repetitive review and discussion helps to shake out both design flaws and software bugs. I tend to push a lot of security stuff to the underlying platform for this reason. But part of it is also trusting the design team. Code auditing is tough work and I generally assume it doesn't get done. What is good however is that a lot of other people are depending on software that is professionally developed in a relatively transparent manner and so chances are somewhat better that people will audit the code at some point.