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Open Source: Density of Software Defects Increase with the Size of the Code Base
Coverity was commissioned in 2006 by the Department of Homeland Security to do a study on Open Source code security. Coverity has published an annual update of those results over each of the last seven years. Each year the report concluded that there aren’t significant differences in the code quality of commercial and Open Source software. Their study compares top-ranking Open Source projects like Linux, PHP and Apache against an anonymous set of code samplse from 300 of their customers. In total, nearly 850 million lines of code were analyzed.
Conclusions of the Coverity report include:
- Code quality of major Open Source projects rank on par and often exceed the quality of proprietary software
- The quality of Open Source projects often begins to degrade as the number of total lines of code in the project exceed one million lines
- Linux remains a benchmark project in terms of the quality of the code — and with more than seven million lines of code, is an exception to the previous finding.
- Smaller projects, those with less than 100,000 lines of code tend to have the lowest density of defects
