Non-Free competitors [LWN.net]

Non-Free competitors

Posted Mar 9, 2006 0:00 UTC (Thu) by ewan (guest, #5533)
In reply to: OpenSSH by corbet
Parent article: Some notes from the Coverity survey

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.

to post comments

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.