Bug Hunting Open-Source vs. Proprietary Software

PreacherTom writes "An analysis comparing the top 50 open-source software projects to proprietary software from over 100 different companies was conducted by Coverity, working in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and Stanford University. The study found that no open source project had fewer software defects than proprietary code. In fact, the analysis demonstrated that proprietary code is, on average, more than five times less buggy. On the other hand, the open-source software was found to be of greater average overall quality. Not surprisingly, dissenting opinions already exist, claiming Coverity's scope was inappropriate to their conclusions."

Horrible Comparisions

[Herkum01]

"Deanna Asks A Ninja: What is the circumference of a moose?!"

"It's michael pailum with his face in a pie times douglas adams squared."

This answer makes as much sense as the article.

Except "Ask A Ninja" made more sense. And was more accurate. And more entertaining.

Can I just get a Ninja hit out on this guy something so these articles will not make it slashdot anymore?

Re:just an example of how "buggy" OSS software.

[Anonymous Coward]

> wine for example only has 0.112 / 1000 lines of code as well.
> and we all know it by far doesn't always do what we want it to do. ;)

Well duh! It is an implementation of the Windows API. And when considering how often the WinAPI does what you want, I think they have made a perfect copy.

Re:How much is it really true?

[joto]

Nope. From my experience, here is what a "n00b developer" does:

1. Look at sourceforge, freshmeat, or somewhere you can find lots of different programming projects
2. Find something that every other "n00b developer" have started to work on, so there are about 200 non-functioning sourceforge projects trying to build the same kind of app
3. Start another project like the previous 200
4. Fail to do any better, and ask people to help contribute to your project instead of the 200 others
5. Forget about it after a few months, but never take down the webpage, so that this evil cycle can continue