__/ [ Linonut ] on Monday 09 October 2006 23:50 \__
> After takin' a swig o' grog, Roy Schestowitz belched out this bit o'
> wisdom:
>
>> Most open source software is better
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | The story is that Coverity ran 50 open source projects through
>> | its bug-checking system, as well as products from 100 proprietary
>> | makers.
>> |
>> | "On average, open-source software is of higher quality than
>> | proprietary software," Chelf wrote. But 11 of the 15 top-rated
>> | programs were proprietary.
>
> It would be better to show the two distributions, get an idea of their
> sigmas, and use signal-detection theory to judge their "intrinsic"
> difference.
>
> Need to read their Green & Swets.
>
>> | Sounds fair enough. Most open source projects are newer than the
>> | proprietary products they seek to displace. Chelf said one unnamed
>> | proprietary product in aerospace had one-fifth the number of bugs as
>> | any open source product out there.
>
> As well it should, as much money is spent on writing code that will
> operate aerospace systems safely.
Precisely. Here we talk about programs whose reliability is not just
something that's nice to have. It's an absolute necessity (real-time, cannot
afford reboots or crashes, etc). It's a case of comparing apples and oranges
because the budget that's assigned to testing can include low-level (binary,
Z specifications, finite state automatons, etc) tests seeks a principle
proof of correctness, at all costs. Reasoning about such programs as though
they can immediately be replaced by some tarball from SourceForge is
unrealistic. Surely, Open Source software is great, but without heavy
investments in testing, you would not want it to power your airplane.
Testing is worth the investment thought. The same cannot be said about
financial (another fairly sensitive case) or even graphical software (can
afford glitches).
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Quote when replying in non-real-time dialogues"
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE GNU/Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
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