On 12/12/05, Gianluca Turconi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Of course, if you want to show to the readers the truth of an axiom > like: "Open Source as a way of producing software has limitations" you > can *show* examples, but you don't *demonstrate* anything. > > It's a common rhetorical technique. > > As far as I can admit Raymond's words are an assumption (that *can* be > still valid) you should admit that what you/Brown/his editor/whoever has > seen or believes to see in nowadays open source project don't prove > Raymond was wrong. BTW, words have their meaning and an empiric fact is > not an evidence of anything.
Actually, I believe it would. The statement "Many eyes all bugs are shallow" is a dogmatic one, and leave no room for exceptions. Note the use of the word "all". The only way you can get out of this is if you believe there simply aren't enough eyes. I find that hard to believe with 53 million downloads. Surely one-hundredth of one-percent of those millions are programmers qualified to work on OOo. That's over 5000 programmers. That's 10000 eyes. If 10000 eyes aren't enough, what is? 100000? A million? With a dogmatic statement "all bugs are shallow" - the burden of proof lies on the one making the statement, and one example of that *not* being true disproves the dogmatic statement. It's the same principle as the orginial objection to Andrew's article that was (supposedly) disproven by a single amature programmer contributing code. However, Andrew's statement was not as dogmatic as the "many eyes" statement, since Andrew said "As far as I know". Which it would be very hard to prove that Andrew did know something at the time of writing the article that he himself claims not to know. -- - Chad Smith http://www.gimpshop.net/ Because everyone loves free software!
