Musings

With Enough Eyeballs: A Manifesto

“With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
— Linus Torvalds

In my previous comments about the Bogdanov hoax, I alluded to this oft-quoted maxim from the world of open-source software, implying that analogous benefits flowed from the use of the eprint archives to disseminate research results in physics.

But is the analogy really correct? What if there really weren’t a mechanism for the thousands of readers of the source code to report back on the bugs that they have found (or to suggest improvements), except perhaps by releasing software packages of their own? Would “Torvald’s Law”, as it is sometimes known, still hold? Would we really still receive full benefit of those thousands of eyeballs?

Or, to put it differently, does hep-th need the analogue of Bugzilla?

Well, Bugzilla is probably not quite the right model, but I do hope that perhaps the weblog might provide such a model. While this idea has occurred to others before, three developments make me sanguine that perhaps now might be the time for it to take off:

1. The development of quality weblogging software like Movable Type eases the burden by automating most of the content-management.
2. The Trackback feature of Movable Type provides an automated way to link back to another site which references a given article. Without this feature, it would be hard to discover what others might have said by way of followup on a given topic. Since there is an Open Specification for Trackback, it can be incorporated into other software, perhaps someday including the archives themselves (“Click here to see commentaries on this paper.”).
3. MathML 2.0. As you can see from previous posts to this weblog, math support in HTML is crude, at best. But MathML is now standardized, and at least one browser (Mozilla) is sufficiently compliant with all the latest standards to implement it.

This last point is, I think, the diciest. If we wish to use this venue for discussing physics, we need a nice way to do math. There are automatic converters, say, from LaTeX to MathML. The difficulty is on the browser end. If we start including snippets like

${\displaystyle \coprod _{i=0}^{\infty }{x}_i}$

in our posts, they will be inaccessible to those with “lesser” browsers like Internet Explorer. This is not a matter of using “proprietary” features of some particular browser. I validate all these pages to ensure that they are perfectly conformant with the published XHTML standards. Its just that not everyone has (yet) implemented those standards.

Or maybe a little elitism is just what we need anyway. What do y’all think?