Falling Apart at the Seams

Falling Apart at the Seams
Kathleen Ellis and Jon Lasser, SecurityFocus 2000-09-04

Last month's Brown Orifice program opened a backdoor to an insecure future. Can open source save the day?

User: friend or enemy? 2000-09-05
Pavel Roskin (1 replies)

User: friend or enemy? 2000-09-08
foo

Open Source Solution 2000-09-05
Pete Kofod (2 replies)

Re: Open Source Solution 2000-09-08
angel'o'sphere (1 replies)

Re: Open Source Solution 2000-09-08
Richard

You said: "In OS development the situation is even worse! ... You see that most OS development projects have a ridiculess low performance in terms of LOC per programmer or LOC per month."

First, many of the sourceforge.net projects that you mention are mature. Second, many of the others are worked on in programmers' part-time. Third, and most damning, is that youy chose LOC as your metric! Anyone can be verbose -- high LOC/functionality rates are hardly a measure of success.

You went on: "If you go to sourceforge.net and pick randomly OS developed projects you find rediculous high bug rates."

Well, a lot of sourceforge.net projects are pretty bad, I'll admit. However, if these were non-open projects they'd still have the same number of total bugs. You'd just have no way of knowing how many they had.

-Richard

[ reply ]

Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/80/3323#3323

Open Source Solution 2000-09-08
Mike Crist

Is the combination or the individual code itself to blame? 2000-09-06

Open source is not a silver bullet 2000-09-06
Your friendly neighborhood software developer

Brown Orifice bug not in Open Source! 2000-09-08
/dev/joe

"All bugs are shallow" is a delusion of Open Source Arguments 2000-09-08
peter (at) smalltalk (dot) org [email concealed]

Open source WORKS! 2000-09-08
Another friendly software developer

Mozilla and JavaScript 2000-09-08
Markus Fleck

How many ways can one article be wrong? 2000-09-08
Charles Miller