Open source code quality is as good as proprietary software

We already knew ofcourse, but now it’s confirmed! 8)

[quote]…code analysis shows that the quality of open source code matches or exceeds that of proprietary software.[/quote].

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2154870/source-code-quality-proprietary-software

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I have deleted my statement in the spirit of open and free expression of technical opinions.

Interesting… I don’t doubt the conclusion given that really only the best programmers I know are the ones that are also contributing to open source projects. So, I’m not at all surprised that when looking at only the larger more popular OSS projects that the bug count is low.

However… I have some big concerns with this study. First, why in the @ #$*! is the U.S. Homeland Security doing this type of research??? Are there not enough threats at our borders to keep them busy??? Apparently, they have entirely too much money to spend.

Secondly, they studied 45 OSS projects for a total of 37M lines of code (832K avg/project) and they studied 41 proprietary projects with a total of 300M lines of code (7.5M avg/project). I’m sorry, but that’s like comparing notepad.exe to MS Word or NETMF to the full .NET Framework. Is this really a fair comparison? These are obviously projects that have totally different levels of complexity to deal with. On the flip side, maybe this is also an argument for scaling back some projects which have become quite bloated over the years and really have too many features.

how did they get proprietary programs to examine? open source proprietary programs?

@ Mike

Exactly. Or they studied the code that corporations allowed them to study. In other words something that nobody cares about.