With a thousand eyes
all defects are small.
The thousand eyes effect
The thousand eyes effect
OK so let's say you are a new user, never written a lick of computer code in
your life, and really have no intention to learn how, no matter how much
someone offered to pay you to learn a computer language. OK fine, but the
GPL is still important to you, maybe even more so. If the source code is
available, someone out there in the world using the code might be
experiencing an anomaly of some sort or other, they'll go to the source code
of the program they are working with to figure out why the program does that,
and if they happen to discover a bug, all the better, they turn it in to
Bugzilla or what ever, and become immortalized for all time. OK another
scenario, suppose I want to write a program to interface with a sound card,
one really good way to get up to speed quickly, is to look at a program's
source code, that already does that very thing. Seriously there are hundreds
of reasons to read code, and folks, not all that much smarter than you do it
all the time. Sometimes just out of curiousity, this is often how you learn
a new algorithm. Now what do you suppose would be the reaction by someone
if they found the source code doing something sneaky to the user? Remember
to someone competent to read code, these things stand out like the red spot
on Jupiter, and thousands of eyes see it... And they talk about it, on the
Internet. Heaven help your reputation if you deliberately put in a back
door to code you distribute. I once was looking at the install routine
for a program that I downloaded, and noticed it left many of the
directories of the /etc/ tree, this is where all the system wide settings are
stored, many of which are security related, open, and world writable!
I sent the guy an E-mail telling him of his blunder, and the guy was
falling all over him self, apologizing for the blunder, and in the next
release it was fixed. Now contrast that with the closed source world, where
not only are sneaky things done, but nothing is ever done to shut these guys
down! Recently Sony contracted a company, First For Internet, to weave some
DRM,(Digital Rights Management) scheme into AudioCDs, this thing
placed a root-kit on every Windows machine the CDs were played on, and
anybody on the internet could take advantage of one such crippled Windows
system, by simply creating files with two dollar signs preceeding, and
following the file name. Doing this made them invisible to the system, and
therefore short of reformatting the whole system, they could not be erased!
People contacted Sony pleading with them to have the key to remove the
root-kit after online gamers put files on their machine that gave their
opponents an unfair advantage, and at first Sony refused! Sony was of the
opinion that the Windows machine belonged to Sony, and that the end user
was rightfully at Sony's mercy. The GPL, and the thousand eyes effect
it engenders normally makes short work of that kind of silliness, but what
if you allow closed source drivers to be loaded onto your machine? Nobody
can easily see what evil lurks within them, no thousand eyes effect to
protect you.
Someone else had this to say about the thousand eyes effect
Back to General observations
The large print Giveth, and the small print Taketh away
CopyLeft License
Copyright © 2000 Jim Phillips
Know then: You have certain rights to the source data,
and distribution there of, under a CopyLeft License