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

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: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.