Linux 2.6, PHP 5.3 and PostgreSQL 9.1 recognized as open source software with high quality code

In 2006, the Department of National Security of the United States and a private company, Coverity , producing a solution for automated code quality testing, concluded an agreement on the largest audit of the source code of open and proprietary software. A few days ago, a company report was published and its findings are summarized below:

• 37 million lines of software code of the forty-five most active Open Source projects were tested, with an average size of the tested projects being 832,000 lines. The indicator “ Average defect density ” was calculated as the number of errors per one thousand lines of code, which averaged 0.45.
• 300 million lines of proprietary code produced by forty-one anonymous companies were verified. The average project size is 7.5 million lines of code, the average defect density was 0.64.
  
• Linux 2.6, PHP 5.3, and PostgreSQL 9.1 were considered open source projects with the highest code quality, the average defect density for which was 0.62, 0.20 and 0.21, respectively.
  
• A total of 4261 bugs were detected in Linux 2.6, of which 1249 were found to be very dangerous or critical. For PHP 5.3 and PostgreSQL 9.1, these figures are 97/15 and 233/116, respectively.
  
• The development reaction rate of developers to the defects found in large open-source projects is very high. Thus, the BRL-CAD development team eliminated more than 1,650 defects within 5 days after the authors of the study notified the developers.
  

The pdf report can be found in more detail by registering here .