Saturday, October 07, 2006

Open-source code has more bugs

Business Week commentary:
Debates over what methods result in the best software often pit those who favor an open-source approach against proponents of proprietary, or closed-source, development. Conventional wisdom holds that open-source software should have fewer security flaws than proprietary software. With more eyes able to look at the underlying source code, bugs should be found and squashed much faster.

But when software security and quality really matter?like crossing the Atlantic on a jet airliner?trust me, you want to fly proprietary. ...

BUG TO BUG COMPARISON. For the first time, we've compared those results with proprietary software from more than 100 different companies, including some of the best-known names in aerospace, financial services, software, and telecommunications?more than 60 million lines of code all together.

In our research using automatic bug-hunting technology, no open-source project we analyzed had fewer software defects (per thousand lines of code) than the top-of-the-line closed-source application.
I believe this. There are some really bad bugs that have been sitting around in popular open-source software for a long time.

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