In its third annual report, Coverity concludes that the quality of open source code is equal to, or even better than that of proprietary software. Coverity analyzed more than 37 million lines of open source code from 45 major open source projects and over 300 million lines of proprietary software code. The proprietary sample is taken from a variety of industries and attempts to match project ages with the length of adoption times of the various open source projects. The open source projects were found to have an average defect density of 0.45, based on the number of defects per 1,000 lines of code, and the proprietary code was found to have 0.64 defects in every 1,000 lines of proprietary software code. Coverity researchers highlighted Linux 2.6, PHP 5.3 and PostgreSQL as projects of excellent code quality, calling them "model citizens". These projects were found to have defect densities of 0.62, 0.20 and 0.21, respectively, said Coverity. Linux was commended because its approximately 7 million lines of code exhibit a defect density that is almost identical to that of competing proprietary software products.

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The Long Roiad to (Software) Freedom

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