Study: Open Source Software Is Improving

The code analysis tools vendor, Coverity, has released the 2009 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source Report[icon:pdf]. The survey, which was originally initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, examines the integrity and quality of open source software. The results are based on an analysis of 11 billion lines of code from 280 open source projects including Firefox, Linux, PHP, Ruby and Samba over three years. The analysis was carried out using Coverity's Scan service.

One of the study's conclusions is that the integrity, quality and security levels of open source code are improving. Since 2006, Coverity's Scan service has exposed more than 11,200 flaws in 180 submitted programs, allowing programmers to fix the detected flaws. The vendor has found that the number of flaws detected by static analysis has decreased by 16 per cent overall.

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