During 2011, the company tested open source projects that totalled over 37 million lines of code and the report also details the results of 300 million lines from anonymous proprietary software produced by Coverity Scan users.Posted on 02/23/2012 10:15:01 AM PST by ShadowAce
Any conviction that open source software (OSS) is somehow inferior to proprietary code, or vice versa, depending on which side of the development fence you sit, is being dispelled by a report from Coverity.
The company has been scanning millions of lines of open source code for its 2011 Coverity Scan Open Source Integrity Report. The results show that the free code quality is on a par with in-house-developed products.
The company said that this year’s study has been massively upgraded with the introduction of the Coverity 5 development testing platform. The new analysis engine incorporates advances in static analysis to improve results and find more defects in any code under test.
During 2011, the company tested open source projects that totalled over 37 million lines of code and the report also details the results of 300 million lines from anonymous proprietary software produced by Coverity Scan users.
On running the scans, it was found that the average defect density (number of defects per 1,000 lines) for open source was 0.45. In the proprietary code the same scan produced an index of 0.64. In both cases this is better than the 1.0 average defect density measured in commercial software.
The cleanest code was found to be Linux 2.6, PHP 5.3, and PostgreSQL 9.1 which weighed in at 0.62, 0.20 and 0.21 respectively. Coverity said that this recognised superior code quality defines the projects as industry benchmarks.
Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, said: “The quality of our code is critical to the ongoing success and adoption of PHP, which includes some of the world’s most popular Web sites. As our code grows and becomes more complex, Scan will become even more important for us as a way to help improve our code quality.”
To balance the results, the company compared projects of similar size in the open source and proprietary fields. Choosing codebases of around seven million lines, the defect density was roughly the same at 0.62. The parity is put down to progressive software testing throughout the development process to achieve the best results possible.
During the process, Coverity also gains an insight into application sizes. It found that the average open source project has 832,000 lines of code, while proprietary applications are much larger at 7.5 million lines.
In addition to the new testing software, Coverity has recently appointed Zack Samocha as Coverity’s Scan project director. “The line between open source and proprietary software will continue to blur over time as open source is further cemented in the modern software supply chain,” he said. “Our goal with Scan is to enable more open source projects to adopt development testing as part of their workflow for ongoing quality improvement, as well as further the adoption of open source by providing broader visibility into its quality.”
The report is the result of the largest public/private sector research project on open source software integrity. The project started in 2006, jointly with the US Department of Homeland Security, but is now wholly owned and managed by Coverity.
I personally use bought-and paid-for-software when it's well written, well supported (can't emphasize that enough) and meets a specialized need that the open source market can't.
But pay for a bog-standard email client that's no better than Thunderbird, or MS Excel when LibreOffice meets every need I have? Not a chance.
Actually these people are PAYING for things MS claims are covered by their patents, not by any proven or court order. And its not google, its the MANUFACTURERS, though now with google makign phones they may have inherited any agreement motorola may have had with MSFT.
As a software developer myself, I find the whole patent thing a bit crazy, the patent office has no idea what they issue patents for..
For instance, entering a password to unlock it is a “PATENT”.. that’s crazy! But the Patent office issued a patent for it.. so that is why your droid has a different zip to the circles in the right order, its all just silliness.
Innovation is stifled by desigining around bogus patents that are meaningless except to lawyers and moochers.
I have no issues giving a patent to someone who truly invents something new, say a new encryption algorithm or something, but swiping a screen left to right is a patententable thing? Come on... its crazy.
It's beyond crazy, especially in the biomedical field. How do you patent genes, DNA and the fundamental building blocks of life? Michael Crighton wrote a really fascinating book called "Next". The Patent Office is issuing patents on things they do not comprehend, and are either too lazy or incompetent to consider the ramifications of what they are doing.
Software patents are merely a symptom of a much more serious problem. I wish I had a solution for this problem - I'd patent it.
Nah. Intellectual property laws are what’s distinctly anti-capitalist here. Since these rely on government fiat to grant effective monopoly power over intangible ideas and innovations, thereby enforcing an arbitrary limitation of supply on goods that in reality are infinitely reproducible. Nothing capitalist about that.
There are quite a few large companies like Red Hat who do very well by selling services to clients.
You are complaining because people contribute their type to projects? Build a better product or more functionality.
Now voting machines should not be available for hacking and that is pretty easy to do. For example, there would be no need for a computerized voting machine to be connected to the internet.
you are all scared of them because the Democrats will not allow them because of the endless recount issue no longer working for them. The media are alarmists.
Computers are the real answer for fair elections. I can envision a day when you go to your polling place to vote (showing proper ID of course). The computer will know if you are entitled to vote there. We probably will want to employee facial recognition so that I know you are really who you say you are, or perhaps DNA sampling would be better.
Yes computers are the answer. I would even volunteer to program them.
The modern-day version of "Give away the razors, sell the blades." "Give away the software, sell the services."
put out a product in a new category, and watch people rage about having to pay anything for it (even as low as $10 is to much for these people). after that, expect to see a free solution pop up and promoted. sloppier and with less features, but free.
the VAST majority of free software is hacked crap. some projects are written well, but the majority isn’t.
as for red hat, they made the majority of their cash supporting a product they never developed (yes, I know they are now developing and submitting... thereby protecting their position).
if you were in the industry in the 80s and 90s, you’ll remember the articles about how the big corporations fear the garage software developer. in response, large corporations embraced the free software movement... raising the barrier to entry for small developers
In a word, no. Most FOSS developers are either do it for a hobby or do it for very commercial reasons. Maybe your impression of open source was colored by Richard Stallman and the GNU project but that view was embraced and co-opted by the joys of making $$.
That said, I’m going to get back to a sweet little contract I picked up supporting a startup that is using FOSS software for BigData and Search.
i did software contracting for 10+ years. although quite lucrative, you won’t be able to ‘get off the wheel.’
creating your own products and putting them out is how you get off the wheel. having anti-capitalists ‘compete’ against you by putting out free software (or making cracks available) undermines the small software shop
I agree, but the tech field won’t be touched.. The software patent laws will update when the H1B visa rules are actually enforced and companies are punished for violating them... Not going to happen.
Understand the frustration. I’m currently writing a proprietary software service/system that is largely based on FOSS software. I expect to sell it for real $$. One must just stay away from areas that are easily commoditized. Sure there’s a risk that a FOSS solution might emerge in your space - but risk from a low cost producer has always been there. I personally do not view FOSS as a barrier to commercial success.
depending on the licensing, you might lose any / all profits by having open source within your product
if you are servicing a niche, the likelihood of an open source solution popping up is very low. general systems with mass appeal is usually the target of open source
Sure, I’m careful about licensing and stick only to the fully open licenses (Apache & BSD). Basing the work off of Hadoop, HBase, ElasticSearch, & Mahout.
The system is for the large scale storage and processing of Business Audit Logging statements. It targets highly regulated businesses, has detailed UI needs, and serious operational concerns. None of those requirements is typically the sweet spot for FOSS solutions. We’ll see - it’s always a risk but I should have a good head start.
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