Opensource Code More Refined Than Closed?

zonker writes "In this poorly titled cnet story (as opposed to an earlier story stating a similar theme), a company named Reasoning says that at first open source code has marginally worse quality than closed source code of the same maturity, but it tends to become better refined through the open-natured development process than closed source. They mention Apache and Linux as examples, however they don't mention the 'competitors' they tested against by name. ."

Comments

Who Knows?

[caffeinex36]

Who really knows? I mean...of course we know some closed-source applications just plain out have horrible code, but being closed-source, we really can't look at it can we? With open-source, I think because it is open, it is critiqued more.

-Rob

Re:Who Knows?

[bluethundr]

I think that the feeling that thousands of your peers will eventually read your code and make fun of you in public forums and mailing lists if it isn't clean is quite an effective way of quality control.

I agree that peer review of your code is a great motivator of quality. But, however incredibly illustrative it may prove, we'll only be able to compare apples to apples on projects that have made the transition from closed to open (like Netscape->Mozilla).

Will we ever have an opportunity to compare Apache to IIS, for example? Likely not. Nor is it likely that we'll ever be able to compare comparable open source projects to anything coded in Redmond.

I personally have no doubt (or rather a belief) that Apache is pure and sweet like a mountain spring, and that IIS is a huge turd-burglar. But how can I know this is true beyond any shadow of doubt. And it just so happens that, while it's nice comparing Open Source to closed stuff from Borland and Netscape, Microsoft is the biggest kid on the block of the closed source world. So how can we know, how say, Open Office compares to MS Office? I really think we can't, and likely won't.

Re:Who Knows?

[ChaosDiscord]

So how can we know, how say, Open Office compares to MS Office? I really think we can't, and likely won't.

How can we know? In a philosophical sense, we can't. But you can find out for practical purposes. Personally I know people who used to work for Microsoft. I heard that the code, while not bad, wasn't that good. I learned about the constant political infighting between groups and an irrational refusal to use external code. This led to such silliness as no major project in Microsoft actually using their own source control system. This lead to the the Office project maintaining their own forked version of the compiler. While none of this actively says their code is bad, it does suggest problems in their system that might be reflected in their code. Of course, while this is second hand to me, it's third hand to you, so you might not trust it. Reasonable enough. But my point is that one way to learn is to get the information from someone who really does know and who you trust.

Relatedly, you can make a certain level of judgement based on the software you receive and work with. If the software is buggy crap, chances are that the code isn't the Mona Lisa of the programming world.

BS

[Anonymous Coward]

I call BS. More refined?? How about we have a semi-scientific study that lists competitors that have the same amount of hours put towards their code as the open source code.

To actually clarify what happened:
-Opensource code can have a lot more man hours put into it in a shorter period of time than closed source

-Close source code is only as good as the person doing the hiring.

Read my previous statement.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Linux user myself for many years I now see the sideeffects of Open Source myself and started to eye for alternative Operating Systems such as MorphOS (Pegasos), MacOSX, BeOS Zeta and Microsoft Windows. There are various reasons for me to do this.

a) The Open Source community used to be a nice one, the philosophy of it was valued high in the first couple of years but meanwhile the entire situation has changed. Companies are trying to protect their IP, other companies don't work fair with the Open Source community by not backporting their changes in the original sources and so on.

b) The audience changed totally, you need to deal with more and more complaining and ranting people every day. People that are always dis-satisfied regardless what you do. Even I as Programmer need to deal with these people. I spent my time writing the programms, fixing bugs, answering technical emails, pay for the Webspace, offer the software and yet you need to deal with dis-satisfied people all overwhere which leads into demotivation of doing something better.

c) Many people wandered off from Linux and Open Source by using alternative Systems (preferabely MacOSX) thus they have a working, aesthetical, nice, round and standardized desktop environment with all tested tools. They can get their work done and don't care for Linux and it's Open Source that much anymore as they initially did. A lot of people started to work a lot less on Open Source because they don't see the need to do this anymore because they get all the software with better quality offered on their alternative System.

Here an example: A lot of GNOME developer moved away working on MacOSX these days and don't look back, while they still help with various fixes, coding etc. they still do this as funjob, they don't see the need to work as hard to make a good Desktop because they have a Microsoft independant OS (MacOSX) which offers them everything and more than GNOME for example. Of course they also see the points written by me here with all the ranting people, no fair play of companies and the general demotivation.

Face it, we all like to be honoured for our work, we all like to hear 'thank you' from the people outside that we spent our time working our ass off on the tools we offer. But the reality is that we deal more with complaining people rather than people who said 'thank you'. We all like to earn some money with what we do. Look, we sit down the entire day, weeks, months working on the Tool, we pay for Webspace and more and we don't even get the money back for the Webspace we pay once per year.

Open Source is indeed a nice thing but the times has heavily changed, complaining users, demotivation, dirty play with companies, sueing of people who wrote Open Source applications like the freecraft person. A very nice game and now it's not available anymore because he got is ass sued off.

Think about it, is it really worth the trouble ? We should concentrate back to the old roots and try making some bucks with our work, getting the webspace paid, stop the insanity with open source. it's a good idea but the license is only a hype. Like everyone can fork the code and release his own version of the software which only ends in 20 derivates which each of them still doesn't do the work it was aimed for. Not to mention that we all are individual people who work for fame, for money for being someone in the community. You work on the software because you love it because you never think about someone comming up forking it and then one day you see a derivate of your work floating around in the community and you get heavily pissed off and stop working on it and feel disappointed and have thoughts in your head saying 'what did i do wrong, why did this person fork my software' and so on. Please don't understand me wrong, think back the time when emacs got forked to xemacs. Or think back when KDE Desktop got heavily trashed by RedHat. You are itching at the egos of people with this. It's really better to start thinking about new and better ways and search for an alternative work on an alternative System.

Re:It makes sense ...

[GeckoFood]

It makes good sense, to a point.

It is not uncommon to have multiple spinoffs from the main source tree. Each branch will have a different path to maturity in the lifecycle of development. All things being equal, each branch should acheive the same quality as all the others, but this isn't always the case.

I have seen open source programs that actually got worse over time as well, but that was due to being passed around like a hot potato as far as maintainer was concerned.

My electric kool-aid acid test: 'pwd'

[shoppa]

My textbook example of this is comparing gnu 'pwd' with commercial Unice's 'pwd'.

I can get most commercial Unix's to core dump by running 'pwd' in the right circumstance. Yes, that's right. A command that takes no arguments and reads nothing from standard input core dumps in the correct circumstance. The circumstance is usually just being in a directory whose path name is several hundred thousand characters long, but some will crash if you set the environment variables right and it looks at them for something having to do with POSIX compliance. I don't know what POSIX compliance should have to do with pwd but then again I'm just a dummy.

OTOH I have never been able to get GNU 'pwd' to dump core.

What does this mean in the big picture? That after many man-years of intensive effort you can write a robust piece of code that takes no input or command-line arguments :-)

Re:In case of Slashdotting

[mccalli]

The study found 18.53 defects per thousand lines of code for Apache...

So then, did they act in the spirit of things and report these back to Apache?

Cheers,
Ian