OpenSSH

Posted Mar 8, 2006 22:58 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: Python Beat Perl by a Tiny Margin; TCL Loses against even PHP by AnswerGuy
Parent article: Some notes from the Coverity survey

I didn't get this into the article, but I asked them about conspicuously missing packages. Both OpenSSH and KDE are evidently on the list for future attention, along with quite a few others.

Non-Free competitors

Posted Mar 9, 2006 0:00 UTC (Thu) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (4 responses)

Also notable by their absence are the non-Free alternatives. This study
was done for the US Deptartment of Homeland Security, and I would imagine
that the US government would have access to the source for much of the
proprietary software they use and be just as interested in the results for
that as for Free software.

The alternative is that the Free tools will have a 'checked by the DHS'
stamp of approval (as it were) and the proprietary ones won't.

Non-Free competitors

Posted Mar 9, 2006 0:35 UTC (Thu) by drj826 (guest, #7352) [Link] (3 responses)

I wonder if the DHS is expressly prohibited from objectively evaluating the quality of proprietary code and posting the results? Hmmm...

Non-Free competitors

Posted Mar 9, 2006 1:11 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Could be, but a simpler possibility exists: purveyors of proprietary software are being encouraged to pay for evaluations of their wares, and have the right to control the disemination of the results.

Non-Free competitors

Posted Mar 9, 2006 1:19 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

Coverity works on source code, and proprietary software vendors are not in the habit of giving out their source code. A number of proprietary software companies use Coverity in-house, but they don't tend to let the world know how many bugs are found (though hopefully they fix the bugs).

Non-Free competitors

Posted Mar 9, 2006 10:15 UTC (Thu) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link]

They hand out their source when the alternative is to be exluded from government contracts on grounds that uninspected code can't be trusted. Microsoft at least have been doing it for some time.

OpenSSH

Posted Mar 9, 2006 12:08 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

Did you get an answer? OpenSSH would be quite interesting and since I prefer KDE over GNOME, I'm sorry to see it being left out.