MySQL & Open Source Code Quality

dozek writes "Perhaps another rung for the Open Source model of software development, eWeek reports that an independent study of the MySQL source code found it to be "in fact six times better than that of comparable commercial, proprietary code." You can read the eWeek write-up or the actual research paper (reg. required)."

Comments

Poor methodology...

[twoslice]

Just measuring the ratio of errors/line in a piece of code is not a very good test of quality. In my experience poorly documented,and formatted code leads to many programming errors being made in the first place. So the resulting error ratio may be just a case of poorly documented/formatted code.

I imagine that I could write such a poor bubble-sort program that would have no errors - but would take a programmer a week to figure out what it does because it is over 5000 lines long...