"Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow."
Linus Torvalds, 1997
* Source: "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond.
* Notes: Called Linus's Law.
* The Linus quote comes Wikipedia’s quotation site.
Ever notice how all computer glitch solutions, once found, are trivial?
Can’t figure out what to do next?
Once figured out, the answer is known, therefore trivial.
Richard Feynman has something on the meaning of trivia.
In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (W.W. Norton/Bantam, 1985), Feynman, a physicist, recalls his post-graduate student days at Princeton where he and his friends would discuss mathematics theorems with the math students, and watch as the math students would go around-and-around when finally one debater would conclude that therefore something was true. And his adversary would then say, “It’s trivial. It’s trivial,” and then goes on to explain in detail why this was already known, all you had to do was to put together this and that and substitute one thing for something else. So it was already well known, no new discovery, no big deal, hence trivial.
So Feynman and some of his friends then decide that all ‘trivial’ means is ‘proved’ by someone, and they invent “a new theorem – that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that’s proved is trivial.”
The mathematicians don’t like to be told they cannot invent or discover anything new, because whenever they seem to, it appears that they proved only the obvious.
So Feynman challenged them to come up with a a new idea in a field in math that was not obvious, say one that is ‘counterintuitive,’ that is contrary to expectations. With Feynman, they had great difficulty doing so. P. 70.
***
What brings this on is that nearly every time I try something new on the computer a glitch occurs that I have to straighten out. I’m not a computer scientist, nor even trained in computer hardware or software. But to avoid being left behind, I determined when the personal computer was introduced by IBM in 1984 that I would buy one and learn to do something on it so I wouldn’t be dependent on secretaries who come and go. The typing class I took in high school when males infrequently learned typing has come in handy. Now I’m always trying new things on computers as the developments occur so fast and furiously, it seems. Last year, feeling that I was falling behind the hardware curve, I resolved to build (assemble) a computer from parts, which I did, not without a lot of false starts and a lot of figuring out what to do from books. It’s better, I think, to take a class so you don’t make obvious mistakes.
But once you figure out how to install a hardware component, or run an applications program such as your connection to the internet or a word processing program, you realize that you could repeat the process a hundred times and it would be boring, because you already knew how to do it. What’s not boring is learning to assemble the computer or get up and running some program for the first time so it behaves according to the way you tell it.
The first time you see a magician perform a card trick, you think, “That’s magic.” But if he shows you how he palmed a card or dealt off the bottom of the deck, you’re not so impressed. It isn’t magic, it’s preparation. The audience is fooled only because it isn’t in on how the illusion is performed.
So when I get stuck because my personal data assistant has lost all the names and addresses it is supposed to be holding, I’m annoyed, but, since I’ve got it backed up, fortunately, all is not lost. I just have to go through the recovery steps. It would be nice to know why my computer misbehaved in the first place, but that may be beyond me. It’s a mystery. The evil genie (magician) in the box was acting up. But if I ever figure out what went wrong, like forgetting to check some box in the setup, or checking the wrong box, I know it’s not magic, it’s trivial. If only I could remember this for the next time this happens a long time from now, I hope.
Gene Kraft, NASA’s launch manager for space shots during the Apollo Program has written a book called “Failure Is Not An Option.” It is a great book that shows how complicated an engineering feat it is to launch a space vehicle from earth. On one of the launches, something went wrong as the astronauts reached their orbit around earth. No one could figure out what had gone wrong, some dangerous thing that risked killing all the astronauts aboard. Finally one of the engineers on the ground calmly spoke into his microphone: “Flip the XYZ switch on the board above the console,” or something like that. There were hundreds of buttons, switches, and other controls that had been installed to run or shut off every one of the systems required to make a space voyage succeed. The astronaut flipped the switch as directed and the mission, along with the crew, were saved.
Was that terrific? Or trivial.
At the time it was terrific. Looking back on it, it seems trivial.
Race car drivers win races when all of their systems work together in perfect harmony.
But let one five cent washer fail, or cotter pin, and the engine can lose oil and blow up, or a wheel fall off.
Important? Or trivial?
The answer depends on whether you’re in the soup and looking forward, or taking it easy and looking back.
Thus the statement: "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." (1997) by Linus, means that glitches are trivial nuisances. Linus invented the computer operating system kernel that with add-ons by others is called Linux. It's becoming so popular that some think it capable, some day perhaps, of knocking Microsoft off its perch as the number one developer and seller of operating systems for computers used all over the world. Linus hasn't become as rich as Bill Gates because he developed Linux as a kind of freeware. It didn't take off, however, until he licensed its use so contributors or marketers can reap some reward for their creativity and hard work.
What Linus means is that the bugs that inevitably occur in any complicated system or program that seem so threatening before they are solved, become trivial once someone says, “All you’ve go to do to solve this problem is to flip this switch, or check (or uncheck) this box.
NASA had enough engineers monitoring its space launch that one of them was so familiar with the systems he was responsible for that he was able to realize that all you needed to do to solve the problem was to flip this one switch. To him the problem must’ve seemed trivial (after the excitement of the emergency was over, that is).
By having loads of engineers at the ready, NASA met the description of Linus’s statement, "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow."
NASA had enough eyes that time.
See below for the supposed etymology of 'trivia' according to Wikipedia, which might be right.
The origin I was taught was the bit about grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the trivia, replaced by the quadrivium, of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, as courses in medieval universities, which taught in Latin, not incidentally.