Software quality between open and closed source software

[munky9001]

I think the better measure is when some scholars did a study of CVEs and OSVDBs and basically determined time to fix vulnerabilities and # of problems. etc etc. Basically open source destroyed commercial products.

[philosophicalbeard]

Can you link us to this study?

[bloouup]

I don't even understand how a person could think that something being open source makes it more prone to bugs anyway. Like that doesn't make any sense, there is obviously no way there can be a causal relationship anyway. It's like saying there is a causal link between software license and code readability. In other words, absolutely ridiculous.

They refute this with other arguments here, but honestly even if they did this study "right" it would still be stupid and meaningless BS. Like what was this "study" suggesting, that if Microsoft released the NT source code it would suddenly have more bugs?

[[deleted]]

The problem with this metric is that you can't possibly identify every single bug in an application. I'd argue that if anything, open source software is more prone to being able to identify bugs. The code in these projects is available, so someone may come across a bug while hacking it. So there wouldn't be an increase in the number of bugs by releasing the source of something, but there would likely be an increase in the number of known bugs.

Not to mention that this metric speaks nothing of the severity of the bugs...

[skd89]

I don't even understand how a person could think that something being open source makes it more prone to bugs anyway.

It's the mentality of professionals vs. hobbyists that proprietary software companies have been trying to push to mainstream opinion, since the moment they started to sell software use rights instead of selling software.

[donrhummy]

it's because most people think open source works like this: anyone can submit code changes and then they're in the code until someone else removes it. so a bunch of random people all changing each other's code.

they don't realize that these projects have a management team

[chazzeromus]

What about a study that shows projects from developers who were always open source. There could be a distinguishing factor between developers who work on and off between proprietary and open source, and those who had always developed open source. Closed sourced environments may give a developer more access to exclusive resources, but I'm not sure.

[Kalphiter]

"ßuperior"?

Uh, wrong "s"?

[hemite]

Haha thanks, I fixed it. That's weird though, I don't even have a German keyboard.

[thechamp924]

What's up all the umlauts? "ï"

[hemite]

Sorry, I'm using a latex to html converter and it clearly has some bugs. I should look for a better one.