Coverity: one bug fixed every six minutes [LWN.net]

Coverity: one bug fixed every six minutes

Posted Apr 3, 2006 23:33 UTC (Mon) by cventers (guest, #31465)
In reply to: Coverity: one bug fixed every six minutes by bk
Parent article: Coverity: one bug fixed every six minutes

I doubt it. Coverity might stop contributing reports if someone started
developing a competitive free software option; otherwise, when running
their checker on open source costs virtually no resources and makes them
buddy-buddy with everyone, why not keep it up?

BK was a disaster because in order to really work on Linux you had to
swallow BK, and the license you had to agree to in order to do so was
nuts.

I'm a very strong supporter of free software. I think BK was a huge
mistake (though in general, I very much respect Linus's decision-making).
But I have to be honest -- I see absolutely nothing wrong with Coverity,
as it stands today. Though Coverity hasn't scanned any of my code, I still
have to say "thank you" for helping to improve the quality of many free
software projects I know and love.

to post comments

Coverity: one bug fixed every six minutes

Posted Apr 4, 2006 13:11 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Plenty of developers managed without BK ...

The problem was, as Linus himself said, "Linus can't scale".

BitKeeper was needed to reduce the load on Linus. And, fortunately for us, BK solved the problem of how to scale Linus, so when BK went away it was easy to write a new tool to do the same thing. Without BK, we would never have had git, so on balance BK almost certainly was good, even if it did cause a few problems along the way.

Cheers,
Wol

BK all for the good -- except for poor lm.

Posted Apr 6, 2006 1:03 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> Without BK, we would never have had git, so on balance
> BK almost certainly was good

Yes. Linus stood for a while on the shoulders of a very
cantankerous giant, who like scaffolding proved to be
dispensable once the bridge was completed :-)

Coverity: one bug fixed every six minutes

Posted Apr 6, 2006 16:55 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Any Coverity customer can continue to run the tool on free software and issue bug reports; the Coverity license agreement does not prevent people from communicating to others about the bugs it finds. When Coverity's contract is up, this is probably what will happen (full disclosure: my employer is a Coverity customer).

The situation is not analogous to BitKeeper in that there is no lock-in issue.

There may be an issue with patents that Coverity might hold, but as Bruce Perens has explained, it is safest for those of us in the field not to look for those patents (damages triple for "knowing infringement").