Linux has fewer bugs
I read this interesting article from a Technology newsletter distributed at my office. Kudos to Linux. Quoting the article below :-
A four-year Stanford University study found that the Linux kernel programming code is better and more secure than the programming code of most proprietary software, Wired News reported yesterday. The researchers found that the 2.6 Linux production kernel -- shipped with software from Red Hat, Novell, and other Linux vendors -- contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code.
Of the 985 bugs identified, 627 were in critical parts of the kernel. Members of the open-source community have already fixed the majority of the bugs documented in the study. According to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code. This would be equivalent to 114,000 to 171,000 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code.
Editors Comments : The story concludes that Linux is a lot cleaner than commercial code. But since the same study wasn't also done on Windows -- with its 40 million lines of code -- it doesn't prove that Linux is cleaner than Windows. Also, since the Linux study was done at Stanford and the commercial code bugs number comes from CMU, the bug statistics are not an apples-to-apples comparison.
A four-year Stanford University study found that the Linux kernel programming code is better and more secure than the programming code of most proprietary software, Wired News reported yesterday. The researchers found that the 2.6 Linux production kernel -- shipped with software from Red Hat, Novell, and other Linux vendors -- contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code.
Of the 985 bugs identified, 627 were in critical parts of the kernel. Members of the open-source community have already fixed the majority of the bugs documented in the study. According to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code. This would be equivalent to 114,000 to 171,000 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code.
Editors Comments : The story concludes that Linux is a lot cleaner than commercial code. But since the same study wasn't also done on Windows -- with its 40 million lines of code -- it doesn't prove that Linux is cleaner than Windows. Also, since the Linux study was done at Stanford and the commercial code bugs number comes from CMU, the bug statistics are not an apples-to-apples comparison.
posted by Avyakt at
10:44 pm
