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Ask About Proprietary vs. Open Source Code Quality

Posted by Roblimo on from the bugstomping dept.

Scott Trappe is CEO of Reasoning, a company that has gained a certain amount of noteriety (and a Slashdot mention) by running its Ilumna automated inspection service on several versions of TCP/IP -- and concluding that the Linux version has fewer bugs than most proprietary ones. Why is this? Let's ask Scott, and also ask him any other question you can think of about software quality and how to achieve it since, after all, that's his business. We'll send him 10 of the highest-moderated questions and post his answers when we get them back.

5 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Give due credit by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Didn't the TCP/IP code originally come from the FreeBSD project?

    No. The Linux TCP/IP stack was written from the spec mainly by Alan while he was at Swansea. Haven't you seen the credit to SUCS in your Linux boot-up? That's the problem with graphical splash screens...

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  2. Re:What about BSD? by b0r1s · · Score: 2, Informative
    For questions like this, watch the FreeBSD lists.

    People like Terry Lambert pop up often with quasi-benchmarks taken from personal experience.

    Check out http://news.gw.com/freebsd.arch/9169 for a detailed way to get 1.6 million simultaneous connections in FreeBSD, a number that Linux simply can't match.

    Check out http://linuxpr.com/releases/5611.html for IBM's simultaneous connection limit:
    In a critical measure of secure Web serving performance, a 4-way eServer p630 set an industry record for entry level (4-way) systems supporting 1,988 simultaneous connections, far outpacing the 568 simultaneous connections achieved by the 4-way Sun Fire V480 on the SPECweb99_SSL performance measure.[2]

    The eServer p630 set an additional 4-way Web serving record when the system processed 6,895 simultaneous connections, offering greater than 50 percent more performance than a 4-way Sun Fire V480 with 4,500 simultaneous connections.[3]


    1.6 million compared to 6,900. To be fair, one is excessively tuned, but despite that, it's a huge difference.

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  3. (-1, Flamebait) by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 2, Informative
    Whereas with open source software, you have no legal recourse if the latest release of sendmail or bind has an exploit, but rest assured that within 24 hours a fix will be released. Compare that with response times from commercial closed source vendors...

    Sure, because it's well known that commercial software vendors never fix serious vulnerabilities as fast as the open source community. Particularly ones like Apple, for example, who have fixed several vulnerabilities in MacOS X way before the equivalent Linux patches were released. Since you like sendmail so much, I suggest you check how fast the major commercial *nix vendors released their patches compared to the open source world, and get back to us.

    Now please pick up your ill-informed pro-OS FUD and go away.

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  4. Re:Give due credit by Arandir · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, Linux used to use the BSD TCP/IP stack. Linus was fine with it. But Alan was tired of the ragging he used to get at LUGs.

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  5. Re:Proprietary v Open by maarten_delft · · Score: 2, Informative

    It is true that MS does not pro-actively disclose the details of the file formats they introduce, it is also true they modifying standard formats (expand), but to say that they do that with the sole purpose of reducing compatability and maintainging their market share is something that should not be generalized.

    As is frequently pointed out, in some cases their software is just overall better than others.

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