Slashdot Mirror
Linux Has Fewer Bugs Than Rivals
sushant_bhatia_progr writes "Wired has an article stating that according to a four-year analysis of the 5.7 million lines of Linux source code conducted by five Stanford University computer science researchers, the Linux kernel programming code is better and more secure than the programming code of most proprietary software. The report, set to be released on Tuesday, states that the 2.6 Linux production kernel, shipped with software from Red Hat, Novell and other major Linux software vendors, contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, well below the industry average for commercial enterprise software. Windows XP, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis. Commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code, according to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium. This would be equivalent to 114,000 to 171,000 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code."
...but while they were going through all those 5.7 million lines of code, would it really have killed them to debug them while they were at it??
Love the Third Amendment?
The problem is that there is very often little vested interest in fixing bugs in closed software...if it can be covered up, then so be it. In open software, there's always a reason, even if it is just to keep people from pointing at your code and laughing.
A rate of 20-30 bugs per 1000 lines would render most programs unusable.
:-)
:)
Sounds like Windows to me!
It's a joke, laugh.
Dammit dbacher, stop making sense and being all rational and stuff!
We're trying to bash the dogshit out of MS products here and you are messing it up!
Go to your cubicle!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.