US Government Studies Open Source Quality

anadgouda writes "US Department of Homeland Security has released a report on open source quality in an effort to study the security of open source. 31 popular open source packages were studied as part of this effort. From the article: 'Coverity's report, Stacking up the LAMP stack: a study of open source quality, was produced as part of a $1.24m, three-year DHS Science and Technology Directorate effort to evaluate and improve the security of open source.'"

Comments

Evaluate and Improve

[Jeremy.DeGroot]

I think it's great that the government is backing this kind of study, and I think the the high marks a lot of packages received will really be a boon to the OSS movement. I think the part of TFA that excites me the most though, is this:

Coverity evaluated 15m lines of open source code with Stamford University's Computer Science Department. The report has identified bugs that can corrupt a machine's memory space, memory leaks, buffer overruns and crashes. Coverity said it would now engage with open source developers to improve code, and identify potential reasons for why some projects have more bugs than others.

If they're going to take their comments back to the communities that develop the software, then this could give the development communities a lot to work on and improve, and that could give us some greatly improved software in a year or two's time. I think work like this is the real strength of Open Source, and I hope to see more of it in the future.

Where's the report?

[boa13]

One would expect that being about open-source and all, and with a purpose of helping open-source developers improve the quality of their code, they would publish the report on a governement website somewhere. C'mon, where's the link?

Meaningless categorization

[sreekotay]

I've always thought it VERY odd to think about "Open Source" as a thing.

It'd be like saying: We studied the quality of software compiled with the Watcom 10.0 C++ compiler. "Open source" cuts across so many levels of skill and projects. You can pretty find projects that support (or destroy) whatever thesis you'd like to put forward

Even more, somebody pays for the development of the software, one way or another.

This artlice (from ONLamp) http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/07/21/soft ware_pricing.html really puts into better perspective. Basically, it says ALL software can be deconstructed to being about the service (at least so long as the technology curve continues, in practice, to limit its lifespan).

--
graphicallyspeaking

Re:money?

[BeanThere]

And I wonder how many more millions they can now save by using OSS, now that they know they can be more confident in its quality? Have you ever heard of the word "investment"?