Open Source quality and security improving

San Francisco: Coverity has released the 2009 Coverity Scan Open Source Report, which says that overall integrity, quality and security of open source is improving. The Coverity scan service measured a 16 percent reduction in static analysis defect density over the past three years among participating projects. The report also claims that since 2006, more than 11,200 defects in open source programs have been eliminated as a result of using the coverity scan service. The total developer support has increased with more than 180 projects having active developers scanning and fixing software defects discovered by scan.

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According to the report, the most common defect types across participating open source projects are still NULL Pointers, resource leaks and unintentional ignored expressions. These defects can be solved if high integrity open source software are developed. "High-integrity open source software is critical, especially given Gartner's estimate that at least 80 percent of commercial software will contain open source code by 2012," said David Maxwell, Strategist, Coverity.

This report is analyzed from more than 11 billion lines of open source code from 280 open source projects over the last three years. The report's findings provide an opportunity for the business industry to examine coding and software integrity trends from some of the popular open source packages, including Firefox, Linux, PHP, Ruby and Samba. "The Coverity scan service began as a public-private research partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to harden the integrity of open source code," said Andy Chou, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Coverity. "The Coverity scan service is a key pillar of our strategy to help open source and commercial developers to continually improve the integrity of all software."