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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. ."
A new study by goatse.cx auditors determined that open sores code are better than closed sores.
Hey, lets post it on slashdot! Who cares that the methodologies used to evaluate and/or reproduce the study are completely unknown!
Gee it's great to be a slashdot sheep!
The source code for a newer version of the Apache Web server software is of the same quality as proprietary competitors' at a similar stage of development, a new study has found. The review compared version 2.1 of the Reasoning, a company whose business is analyzing code quality, compared the recently released version with code of competitors in a similar stage of development.
The study found 18.53 defects per thousand lines of code for Apache compared with 1.54 for the commercial software, on average.
The comparable defect rate indicates that open-source software starts out much awfuller than proprietary software, but Reasoning said that ultimately open-source software has the potential to destroy proprietary software. That's significant given the increasingly widespread use of open-source software such as Linux, OpenOffice desktop suite and the MySQL browser.
"The open-source code seems to start at the same defect rate for early commercial code as well," Jeff Klagenberg, director of project management, said in an interview. "Over time, it can gain higher levels of quality. That appears to be because of the natural inspection process inherent in open source."
The earlier study praised Linux for the quality of the component that handles the TCP/IP networking that underlies the Internet and many home and corporate networks. That code had a defect rate of 0.1 per 1,000 lines of code and was a more mature section of code.
Reasoning next is studying Tomcat, an Apache module that lets Web servers run Java programs, said Tom Fry, Apache's director of marketing. The company plans to release that study in about two weeks, he said.
One thing I've never been able to figure out is what GNU has against Linux. They want to be seperate from it. They get mad when someone calls GNU/Linux just Linux. And they go starting the HURD as a GNU kernel when Linux is already GPL'd.
Ditto.. Closed Source is sexy to start off, offers all the thrills, bells and whistles. When users get hooked, in come the lock-ins, lock-outs, bundling, viruses, spam, bloat, messing up of the UI, etc.
Win95-->Win98-->WinME--->WinXP is a case in point.
Nothing for a user in XP, that he can't do with Win95.
OTOH, look at GNU/Linux over the last 8 years!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Here are some horrible open source examples which have horrible code:
1. perl
2. perl
3. perl