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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."
i call bullsh*t to all these partisan studies! "windows better", "linux better", ... why won't this stop at least from the "good guys" and let's all have some objective analysis of the REAL cost/benefit situation instead of each side stubbornly stating how superior and infallible they are!
linux has a severe lack of a stringent development process, does little coordinated code reviews and is a big lump of monolithic code!
yet, the discovery-bugfix time is quite acceptable and with enough background knowledge the stability and performance is quite good. but why trash (implicitely) the quality of the alternatives? *BSD and solaris for example are definitely superior to GNU/linux in some areas and have an excellent track record at security, stability. why do we have to worship linux as the non-plus-ultra when in fact it simply is a respectable alternative to windows on the server?
oh, sure, windows has its problems, but at its core the once-microkernel approach is not all that bad and bad drivers will crash linux just as well as windows!
but apart from shady business practices and horrible reaction times to exploitable holes (patch day, anyone?) microsoft is actually making an effort and has some development practices in place that wouldn't be such a bad idea for the open-source community to adopt like nightly regression tests and driver certification.
i am far from saying how wonderful microsoft is as a software producer, but simply bashing them all the time (even if in self defense) won't make the open-source movement look any better!
come on! give a little respect to the *BSD guys who are actually making an effort of code reviews and an emphasis on security! and even give some credit to microsofts (recent) efforts to work towards security (even if in vain when faced with the horrid IE code base)...
open source has HUGE issues with code quality and developer trust, so we shouldn't mouth off about our superiority until we can make sure that total chaos won't break out with the next kernel release!
doing your cutting-edge development in the current "stable" kernel is just as bad as many things microsoft is doing!
jethr0
> to that business move when M$ did it. Now, however, that decision is coming back to bite them on the tender bits: the browser is part of the OS, ergo bugs in the browser count as bugs in the OS.
You are suggesting that they should have sacrifice usability for a meaningless statistic. What a typical dumb PHB statement.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
:(){echo "hello world"|:&};:
It would be cool if it didn't suck.