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The Coverity open source integrity report is an objective presentation of open source code quality and defect data collected from the Coverity Scan service.
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.
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.
The last two releases of Ubuntu, 9.04 and 9.10 seem to generate a lot of complaints of bugs. The good news is that this is all very natural, and even to be expected given the deep changes that are being made to the stack. Bugs cannot be fixed until they are found, and they cannot be found until users are running the code.
More bugs, and bug reports, are good. No really, at least that's what Karl Fogel says in trying to squash the idea that bugs are "technical debt that developers must repay. Fogel, who works for Canonical on the Launchpad platform, says that it's a fallacy that growths in bug reports is bad. On the contrary, more bug reports mean good news because it means more users are using the project.
The object of this post is to make you think about ways we could improve each one. I’ll try to link to bugs where there are bugs, but a lot of these are quite new design decisions only present in 10.04 and hence don’t have bugs filed.
* 658 New bugs need a hug
* 131 Confirmed bugs just need a review
Nothing needs to be said about how important Firefox is, it just needs to work. With over 1300 bugs currently open, we can use a lot of help getting the information needed to shake out the bugs.
Security vulnerabilities are often the result of software bugs. It is important to keep software up-to-date, as malicious parties often can exploit bugs in outdated software. Package managers were created to automate the process of package update and installation, however, if the package manager is not secure, it may represent another avenue of attack!
