The code analysis specialists Coverity attest to a quality improvement in the open source software they tested. Coverity investigates code from diverse open source applications in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The code analysis tools vendor, Coverity, has released the 2009 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source ReportPDF. The survey, which was originally initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006, examines the integrity and quality of open source software.

Don Marti is chair of Open Source World (previously LinuxWorld). A Linux user since 1994, Don has been a writer, editor, professional services consultant, and conference organizer. Marti walks us through Linux security from the developer perspective and shares his thoughts on today’s biggest code quality issues, open source advantages and best practices for proprietary and OSS teams.

Coverity famously helps open source projects audit their code and eliminate security holes and other bugs, and earns its corporate income by selling software that does the same thing to proprietary software companies. Few seem to realize, though, that Coverity started doing free open source code audits because it got a grant from the US Department of Homeland Security.

Anyone who has read many of my blog entries or articles will know that I'm a great fan of code quality metrics. By code quality metrics, I am referring to coding standards, best practices, complexity, but also to other associated statistics such as the number of unit tests run and the level of code coverage.

The overall number of defects in open-source projects is dropping, a new study by vendor Coverity has found.

Open source is great. Code is knowledge and knowledge should not be hidden forever. ASAP it should become public for all to use and benefit from. In the past the flow of information was slow, but nowadays is fast, and the faster we share and need information, the greater the need society has for all code, which is knowledge, to become public, with no strings attached.

The spirit of the open source movement operates under the assumption that software’s most valued resource, its code, should be freely available to everyone. Despite the obvious advantages of making code readily available to anyone around the world, there are some cultural differences that complicate the open source movement.

It was unfortunately reported yesterday by a number of sources that Amazon had released the source code for the software running on the Kindle DX.
This isn’t all of the Kindle source code. It’s a selection released in order to comply with the license requirements of the code originally written by other people (like the GNU Project) which Amazon modified for its own purposes.