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Old 27th February 2012
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Default Report: Open source software quality is better than proprietary software

From http://h-online.com/-1443437

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Coverity's latest Coverity Scan Open Source Report has found that the quality of open source code is equal to, or even better than that of proprietary software.

[snip]

In their announcement of the latest edition of their open source report, the Coverity researchers highlighted Linux 2.6, PHP 5.3 and PostgreSQL as projects of excellent code quality, calling them "model citizens". These projects were found to have defect densities of 0.62, 0.20 and 0.21, said Coverity.
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Old 27th February 2012
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Quote:
the Coverity researchers highlighted Linux 2.6, PHP 5.3 and PostgreSQL as projects of excellent code quality, calling them "model citizens".
I don't know anything about the source of Linux or pgsql, but I have rummaged around in the source of PHP, and I would *not* call it "excellent". It's *far* from excellent and find it quite surprising they use PHP as an example of "code excellency" .
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Old 28th February 2012
Ninguem Ninguem is offline
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Not many people seem to look at code quality in the same manner of a user of UNIX derived system. "What is the underlying problem?" is replaced with "What's the quickest fix I can find?" in many cases.
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Old 28th February 2012
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I think code quality is similar to health care, most end users are unable to judge quality and entrust their decisions to a specialist. In my view, a major problem is the the specialist does not always make recommendations in the end users (patients) best interest.

The end user can only judge that it works - patients mainly assess if they feel better and perceive that they are healthier.
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Old 28th February 2012
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Based on a couple of quotes from Andrew Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix, I would not categorize Linux as "quality" software.
Quote:
Andrew Tanenbaum : We think NetBSD is a mature stable system. Linux is not nearly as well written and is changing all the time.
Quote:
Andrew Tanenbaum : I don't buy it. He is speculating about something he knows nothing about. Our modules are extremely well defined because they run in separate address spaces. If you want to change the memory manager, only one module is affected. Changing it in Linux is far more complicated because it is all spaghetti down there.
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Old 28th February 2012
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The big question for me here is what is their measurement device exactly? They have some kind of code scanner, which I guess is a static analysis tool. How would such a thing work conclusively? How much more sophisticated is their analysis than find /usr/src -name \*.c | xargs lint | wc -l?

You can't really tell from reading the article.

Nevertheless, I like that this conclusion is thrown out there with all the other half baked conclusions. If more pointy haired bosses want Open Source software now, so much the better. Now if we could only convince them not to make us sign employment contracts that sign over the sum products of our brains to the company (excuse the possibly U.S. centric business methods reference) so we could attempt to give something back without causing legal havoc.
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Old 28th February 2012
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The Coverity website has a demo of their magic code scanner. All the demo says is that it allows you to define defects, but doesn't give a demo of that. Then it scans your code to find the defects you define.

I could not tell from the demo, how it can scan closed source code.

The demo was painful...please don't watch I suffered enough for all!
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