450 Million Lines of Code Can't Be Wrong: How Open Source Stacks Up

An anonymous reader writes "A new report details the analysis of more than 450 million lines of software through the Coverity Scan service, which began as the largest public-private sector research project focused on open source software integrity, and was initiated between Coverity and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006. Code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary software — and both continue to surpass the industry standard for software quality. Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of software code) is a commonly used measurement for software quality. The analysis found an average defect density of .69 for open source software projects, and an average defect density of .68 for proprietary code."

Comments

65 million lines of HOST file can't be wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Just ask apk!

and all the children are above average

[Anonymous Coward]

"Code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary software — and both continue to surpass the industry standard for software quality."

What is this third kind of software that is neither open source nor proprietary which is bringing down the average industry standard for software quality? Because if there is only open source and proprietary then they can't both be better than average. Or perhaps the programmers are from Lake Wobegon?

Re:Unforeseen consequences

[Alain Williams]

/* This
* comment
* is
* part
* of
* the
* corporate
* edict
* to
* reduce
* the
* defect
* rate
* reported
* by
* Coverity
*/
  printf("hello world\n");

Re:Correction

[hduff]

It mean over 300,000 lines of code are wrong, most of it in the app I keep trying to use.