The law was formulated by Eric S. Raymond in his essay and book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999), and was named in honor of Linus Torvalds.
Presenting the code to multiple developers with the purpose of reaching consensus about its acceptance is a simple form of software reviewing.
[4] While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".
[5] The persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered as a refutation of Raymond's dictum.
[9] In 2015, the Linux Foundation's executive director Jim Zemlin argued that the complexity of modern software has increased to such levels that specific resource allocation is desirable to improve its security.